From Yahoo News:

Sen. John McCain’s advertising consultants have resigned from his presidential campaign, the latest in a rash of staff shake-ups in recent weeks.

McCain communications director Jill Hazelbaker on Wednesday described the departure of Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens as amicable and said the Arizona Republican “appreciates their service” but accepted their resignations when they were offered Monday night.

Schriefer and Stevens were part of George W. Bush’s campaign team in 2000 and 2004 and were part of Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. The Wall Street Journal first reported the departures Wednesday night.

Aides downplayed their departure as a sign of a troubled campaign that has struggled financially and has been hit hard by the senator’s support for the unpopular war in Iraq and the failed immigration reforms.

McCain is trying to reassemble his staff and his candidacy after a disastrous six months of weak fundraising and dropping poll numbers.

McCain’s campaign manager Terry Nelson and his longtime political adviser Jon Weaver resigned earlier this month. The campaign reported ending the second quarter of the year with $3.2 million cash on hand and $1.8 million in debts. Several campaign consultants and vendors are owed money.

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From Information Clearing House:

By Ray McGovern

What do Rep. John Conyers (D, Michigan), chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and President George W. Bush have in common? They both think they can dis Cindy Sheehan and count on gossip columnists like the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to trivialize an historic moment.

I-ll give this to President Bush. He makes no pretence when he disses. He would not meet with Sheehan to define for her the “noble cause” for which her son Casey died or tell her why he had said it was “worth it.”

Conyers, on the other hand, was dripping with pretence as he met with Sheehan, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, and me yesterday in his office in the Rayburn building. I have seldom been so disappointed with someone I had previously held in high esteem. And before leaving, I told him so. Throwing salt in our wounds, he had us, and some fifty others in his anteroom arrested and taken out of action as the Capitol Police “processed” us for the next six hours.

As we began our discussion with Conyers, it was as though he thought we were “born yesterday,” as Harry Truman would put it. With feigned enthusiasm he began, Let’s hold a Town Hall meeting in Detroit so we can talk about impeachment. Get out my schedule; let’s see, we need to hear from everyone about this.

Been there, done that, I reminded the congressman. On May 29, 2007 Col. Ann Wright and I were among those who flew to Detroit for a highly advertised Town Hall meeting on impeachment, because we were assured that John Conyers would be there.

That Town Hall/panel discussion was arranged by the Michigan chapter of the National Lawyers Guild less than two weeks after the Detroit City Council passed a resolution, cosponsored by Conyers- wife Monica Conyers-calling for the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. We had hoped that Monica’s clear vision and courage might be contagious.

Husband a No-Show

I had to remind the congressman that he did not show up for the Town Hall, preferring to put in a cameo appearance and quickly leave a half-hour before it began.

Apparently, that incident was of such little consequence to the congressman that he had completely forgotten about it and was about to try to resort to the same subterfuge. And that was less than two months ago. Small wonder, then, that he has apparently forgotten the oath he took, much longer ago, to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Selective Alzheimer’s? I don-t know. What was clear was that he had forgotten a whole lot. I pointed to James Madison’s role in crafting a Constitution that mentions impeachment no fewer than six times. And for those, like John Conyers, who may have forgotten, Madison had this to say at the constitutional convention, “A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.) I mentioned my career as a CIA analyst, said there is abundant proof, much of it documentary, that Bush and Cheney had deliberately deceived Congress into approving a war of aggression, and asked what could be more subversive of the Constitution.

The congressman’s reply: Madison did not say Conyers has to impeach every one. Why, if I had to impeach everyone for high crimes and misdemeanors, that’s all my committee would have time to do.

Read more »

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From Boston.com:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. –A U.S. attorney on Wednesday declined a federal judge’s request to prosecute a prominent Mississippi attorney on allegations of criminal contempt in a Hurricane Katrina insurance dispute.

U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said in the letter to U.S. District Judge William M. Acker Jr. that he chose not to prosecute Richard F. Scruggs and his firm “following a serious and thorough review of the facts.”

In his June 15 request, Acker said he would appoint another attorney to handle the prosecution if Martin declined the court’s request. His office did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment Wednesday.

Acker ruled in June that Scruggs willfully violated a Dec. 8 preliminary injunction that required him to deliver all documents about State Farm Insurance Co. that two whistleblowers secretly copied. Sisters Cori and Kerri Rigsby were heavily involved in processing claims for State Farm, and said they duplicated the documents to back up their allegations the company wrongly denied claims after Katrina.

Acker said that instead of complying, Scruggs sent the documents to the Mississippi attorney general’s office “for the calculated purpose of ensuring noncompliance with or avoidance” of the injunction.

A spokeswoman for Martin’s office, Jill Ellis, said the U.S. attorney had no further comment beyond the letter.

Scruggs, a highly successful plaintiffs’ lawyer who is the brother-in-law of U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., is suing State Farm on behalf of hundreds of Mississippi residents.

His son and law partner in Oxford, Miss., Zach Scruggs, said that Martin’s letter “says all that needs to be said about this matter, and it would be inappropriate for us to say anything else at this time.”

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R.I.P. Soldiers!

The Department of Defense announced today the death of four soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. They died July 23 in Sarobi District, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near their vehicle. They were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne), 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Vicenza, Italy.

Killed were:

1st Sgt. Michael S. Curry Jr., 37, of Dania Beach, Fla.

Sgt. Travon T. Johnson, 29, of Palmdale, Calif.

Pfc. Adam J. Davis, 19, of Twin Falls, Idaho.

Pfc. Jessy S. Rogers, 20, of Copper Center, Alaska.

An Army paratrooper who grew up in Hollywood and Dania Beach was one of four soldiers killed recently in Afghanistan when a roadside bomb exploded, the paratrooper’s family said.

Sgt. 1st Class Michael S. Curry, 37, had spent the last 20 years of his life in the Army, and for most of that time he had been assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade at Caserma Ederle, in Vicenza, Italy. It’s also where he met his wife and had two sons, one of whom turned 12 today. The other is 9.

“He was a wonderful husband, father and son,” said Curry’s sister, Niki Martin, 35. “He was so wonderful, like something that is too good to be true.”

But it was true, relatives said Tuesday, as they mourned and discussed plans for a local memorial service. Curry will be buried in Italy next week, relatives said.

The U.S. Department of Defense would not confirm Tuesday that Curry was killed in the explosion, which happened Monday. A spokesman said it’s the department’s policy to wait 24 hours after a serviceman’s relatives have been notified of the death before releasing his identity.

Curry’s relatives in Dania Beach said they learned of the tragedy early Tuesday, in a transatlantic phone call from Curry’s wife.

It was the second time Curry had been ordered to the Middle East region. He left for Afghanistan in March.

His loved ones were proud but they were also worried.

More at the Sun Sentinel

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Current and former intelligence officials say the Bush Administration’s National Intelligence Estimate regarding terrorist threats to the United States does not provide evidence to support its assertions and may have inflated the domestic threat posed by the Lebanese political and military group Hezbollah, perhaps because it receives financial support from Iran.

According to the report, Hezbollah - a Shi’a Muslim group with ties to Iran that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the United States - may target the US domestically if the US poses a serious threat to Iran. But sources say the allegations about Hezbollah were simply “thrown in.”

Speaking under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, several intelligence officers asserted that the report was sloppy and lacked supporting evidence. “The NIE seems… fiddled [with],” regarding Hezbollah, one high-ranking CIA official said. “Whether it is or isn’t is not really the point. The point is that nobody is ready to believe it.”

“As regards to the Hezbollah ‘threat,’” the official added, “they just threw that in. “Nobody in CIA talks to Hezbollah, and they’re living off their assessments from back in the 80s, which they really never got right anyway.”

Full article at Raw Story

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So what does the oversight committee do? They send Fredo a nice letter asking him if there’s anything he’d like to change in his testimony. Oh, and when Leahy was asked if it was possible to impeach the attorney general, his answer was….. Yes it is, but by the time we’d do it his term would be over. Again…… politics as usual. I’m so sick of this shit.

By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Documents indicate eight congressional leaders were briefed about the Bush administration’s terrorist surveillance program on the eve of its expiration in 2004, contradicting sworn Senate testimony this week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The documents underscore questions about Gonzales’ credibility as senators consider whether a perjury investigation should be opened into conflicting accounts about the program and a dramatic March 2004 confrontation leading up to its potentially illegal reauthorization.

A Gonzales spokesman maintained Wednesday that the attorney general stands by his testimony.

At a heated Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Gonzales repeatedly testified that the issue at hand was not about the terrorist surveillance program, which allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on suspects in the United States without receiving court approval.

Instead, Gonzales said, the emergency meetings on March 10, 2004, focused on an intelligence program that he would not describe.

Read more at the AP

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from The BBC

Two bomb attacks have killed at least 50 people and injured 135 in Baghdad as crowds celebrated a famous victory by the national football team.

The first strike killed 30 people in the Mansour district, where fans were marking Iraq’s win against South Korea in the Asian Cup semi-finals.

Twenty died in the next blast, at an army checkpoint in east Baghdad.

Thousands had gathered on the streets of Baghdad, dancing and chanting in a rare moment of national unity.

Police say at least 130 people were wounded in the two attacks, which deliberately targeted celebrating football fans.

Some 75 of those were hurt in Mansour, where a car exploded in the midst of an excited crows, and almost 60 injured by the attack on the checkpoint.

“I was in a car with my friends, people all around were celebrating and then there was a huge explosion and a lot of fire,” one anonymous eyewitness to the first bomb attack told the AFP news agency.

read more at The BBC

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By Frank Askin
The Washington Post

It seems that the House Judiciary Committee is considering seeking help from the Justice Department to enforce contempt citations against Bush administration officials such as Joshua Bolten who refuse to respond to congressional inquiries into alleged White House wrongdoing. That would be a mistake.

Such a strategy leaves Congress beholden to hostile executive branch officials to enforce its prerogatives on exactly the type of charges that the administration said this week it would not allow officials to pursue. This strategy also would allow the president to pardon his underlings should they ever be indicted and convicted.

Yet under historic and undisturbed law, Congress can enforce its own orders against recalcitrant witnesses without involving the executive branch and without leaving open the possibility of presidential pardon.

And a Supreme Court majority would find it hard to object in the face of two entrenched legal principles.

First is the inherent power of Congress to require testimony on matters within its legislative oversight jurisdiction.

So long as Congress is investigating issues over which it has the power to legislate, it can compel witnesses to appear and respond to questions. That power has been affirmed over and over in prosecutions for contempt.

read more at The Washington Post

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By Jay Newton-Small/Washington
from Time Magazine Online

Just when it seemed that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales‘ reputation on Capitol Hill couldn’t possibly get much worse, he showed up Tuesday for yet another hearing. And as with so many of his recent appearances before Congress, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee raised a lot more troubling questions than it answered - not just about his own conduct of and honesty about the U.S. attorney firings, but also about the Administration’s domestic intelligence gathering programs.

That new wrinkle stemmed from Gonzales’ testy exchange with Senator Arlen Specter, the panel’s top Republican. Specter opened up with former Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s testimony to the panel in May over Gonzales’ actions while serving as White House Counsel. Comey had alleged that Gonzales tried to convince an ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in the hospital recovering from gallbladder surgery, to sign off on Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. “There are no rules saying he couldn’t take back authority,” Gonzales said, trying to explain that they had hoped Ashcroft might be able to sign off on an intelligence program due to expire the next day, a program that Comey as acting AG had refused to renew.

But what Specter really wanted to know was how that meeting squared with Gonzales’ previous testimony that there had been no serious internal disagreements over the program. Gonzales seemed to believe he had a simple explanation. “The disagreement that occurred was about other intelligence activities, and the reason for the visit to the hospital was about other intelligence activities,” the Attorney General said. “It was not about the terrorist surveillance program that the President announced to the American people.”

read more HERE

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Steven Schwankert
IDG News Service

News Corp’s popular MySpace.com social networking site hosted Web pages for at least 29,000 known sex offenders as of July 2007, North Carolina’s Attorney General said Tuesday.

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office said in a statement that based on MySpace’s own estimates, the number of registered sex offenders with MySpace pages under their own names was four times more than the company’s previous estimate.

Cooper is proposing that North Carolina pass legislation to ban registered sex offenders from using social networking sites that allow minors, and strengthening other anti-child pornography and criminal penalties for Internet solicitation of minors and children for sex. The proposal also suggests that social networking sites’ underage users be required to get parental permission before registering and posting personal information.

Young people have been the early adopters and most avid users of social networking sites, making them targets for sexual predators.

MySpace said it would provide sex offender data to state attorneys general in late May, after first saying it would not make such disclosures. Cooper did not say when MySpace had provided the data.

The site has come under attack not only for the risque content posted by some of its members, but by allegedly providing a venue for sexual predators targeting children. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal estimated in May that at least 5,000 sex offenders were registered for MySpace using their own names, with an unknown number using false identities.

read more HERE

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TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday Iran would never yield to international pressure to suspend its uranium enrichment work.

“Iran will never abandon its peaceful (nuclear) work,” Ahmadinejad told state television. “Our nuclear work is legal and why should we stop it?”

Iran says its nuclear program is meant to generate electricity so it can export more of its oil wealth — not to make bombs, as Western powers suspect after years of Iranian secrecy and evasions.

Two sets of sanctions have been imposed on the Islamic state for defying repeated U.N. resolutions demanding it suspend all nuclear fuel activity.

Ahmadinejad said U.N. resolutions could not prevent the Islamic state from obtaining nuclear technology.

“Let’s say they issue the resolution 300 … what will happen? It should be remembered that Iran is obtaining nuclear technology,” Ahmadinejad said. “They have to eventually accept that.”

In an attempt to avert tougher sanctions, Tehran has agreed to increase its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency to clarify the scope of its nuclear work.

read more here

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By AMIR SHAH

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan police discovered the bullet-riddled body of a South Korean hostage Wednesday as the Taliban released eight other captives who were taken to a U.S. military base, officials said.

Because of a recent spike in kidnappings - including an attempt against a Danish citizen Wednesday - police announced foreigners were no longer allowed to leave the Afghan capital without their permission.

The male South Korean victim was found with 10 bullet holes in his head, chest and stomach in the Mushaki area of Qarabagh district in Ghazni province, the region where 23 South Koreans were kidnapped last week, said Abdul Rahman, a police officer.

A police official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation, said militants told him the hostage was sick and couldn’t walk and was therefore shot.

read more at YAHOO

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Yeah. Sure. Right!

BREAKING

WASHINGTON (AP) – The House Judiciary Committee voted contempt of Congress citations Wednesday against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and President Bush’s former legal counselor, Harriet Miers.

The 22-17 vote — which would sanction for pair for failure to comply with subpoenas on the firings of several federal prosecutors — advanced the citation to the full House.

A senior Democratic official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the House itself likely would take up the citations after Congress’ August recess. The official declined to speak on the record because no date had been set for the House vote.

Article HERE

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These evil bastards have no shame…….

Twenty soldiers deployed to Iraq from this Army base were killed in May, a monthly high. That same month, the base announced a change in how it would honor its dead: instead of units holding services after each death, they would be held collectively once a month.

The anger and hurt were immediate. Soldiers- families and veterans protested the change as cold and logistics-driven. Critics online said the military was trying to repress bad news about deaths. By mid-June, the base had delayed the plan.

[Its commander, Lt. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby, was expected to decide Wednesday whether to go through with it.]

“If I lost my husband at the beginning of the month, what do you do, wait until the end of the month?” asked Toni Shanyfelt, who said her husband was serving one of multiple tours in Iraq. “I don-t know if it’s more convenient for them, or what, but that’s insane.”

Military historians and scholars say the proposal and its fallout highlight the tender questions facing the armed forces as casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan mount, and some soldiers and their families come to expect more from military bases than in past conflicts.

During Vietnam and Korea, the historians say, many bases were places for training soldiers and shipping them out, rarely to see them return, with memorial services uncommon. Now, in the age of the all-volunteer force, the base has become the center of community. The Army and other branches have fostered the idea that military service is as much about education, job training and belonging to a community as national defense.

More at the New York Times

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