NYT: Impeach Gonzalez

Here:

Mr. Gonzales is more concerned about doing political-damage control for Mr. Bush — in this case insisting that there was never a Justice Department objection to a clearly illegal program — than in doing his duty. But the White House continued to defend him.

As far as we can tell, there are three possible explanations for Mr. Gonzales’s talk about a dispute over other — unspecified — intelligence activities. One, he lied to Congress. Two, he used a bureaucratic dodge to mislead lawmakers and the public: the spying program was modified after Mr. Ashcroft refused to endorse it, which made it “different” from the one Mr. Bush has acknowledged. The third is that there was more wiretapping than has been disclosed, perhaps even purely domestic wiretapping, and Mr. Gonzales is helping Mr. Bush cover it up.

Democratic lawmakers are asking for a special prosecutor to look into Mr. Gonzales’s words and deeds. Solicitor General Paul Clement has a last chance to show that the Justice Department is still minimally functional by fulfilling that request.

If that does not happen, Congress should impeach Mr. Gonzales.

Much more from TPM.

Illegal Data Mining?

NYT:

WASHINGTON, July 28 — A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.

The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing
Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the N.S.A. program.

More from TPM-- basically, again, the controversial aspects are still not clear, and there must be more to this story.

"Al Qaeda" (al-CIA-duh) Strong as Ever

Here, for example.

Bush can't even win a bogus war on terror.

Oy.

Profile in Cowardice

Frank Rich:

Asked last week to explain the president’s poll numbers, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center told NBC News that “when we ask people to summon up one word that comes to mind” to describe Mr. Bush, it’s “incompetence.” But cowardice, the character trait so evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to understanding Mr. Bush’s cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and hubris.

Even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, a consistent Bush and Libby defender, had to take notice. Furious that the president had not given Mr. Libby a full pardon (at least not yet), The Journal called the Bush commutation statement a “profile in non-courage.”

What it did not recognize, or chose not to recognize, is that this non-courage, to use The Journal’s euphemism, has been this president’s stock in trade, far exceeding the “wimp factor” that Newsweek once attributed to his father. The younger Mr. Bush’s cowardice is arguably more responsible for the calamities of his leadership than anything else.

People don’t change. Mr. Bush’s failure to have the courage of his own convictions was apparent early in his history, when he professed support for the Vietnam War yet kept himself out of harm’s way when he had the chance to serve in it. In the White House, he has often repeated the feckless pattern that he set back then and reaffirmed last week in his hide-and-seek bestowing of the Libby commutation.

The first fight he conspicuously ran away from as president was in August 2001. Aspiring to halt federal underwriting of embryonic stem-cell research, he didn’t stand up and say so but instead unveiled a bogus “compromise” that promised continued federal research on 60 existing stem-cell lines. Only later would we learn that all but 11 of them did not exist. When Mr. Bush wanted to endorse a constitutional amendment to “protect” marriage, he again cowered. A planned 2006 Rose Garden announcement to a crowd of religious-right supporters was abruptly moved from the sunlight into a shadowy auditorium away from the White House.

Nowhere is this president’s non-courage more evident than in the “signing statements” The Boston Globe exposed last year. As Charlie Savage reported, Mr. Bush “quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office.” Rather than veto them in public view, he signed them, waited until after the press and lawmakers left the White House, and then filed statements in the Federal Register asserting that he would ignore laws he (not the courts) judged unconstitutional. This was the extralegal trick Mr. Bush used to bypass the ban on torture. It allowed him to make a coward’s escape from the moral (and legal) responsibility of arguing for so radical a break with American practice.

In the end, it was also this president’s profile in non-courage that greased the skids for the Iraq fiasco. If Mr. Bush had had the guts to put America on a true wartime footing by appealing to his fellow citizens for sacrifice, possibly even a draft if required, then he might have had at least a chance of amassing the resources needed to secure Iraq after we invaded it.

Impeachment Poll

45% in favor of impeaching Bush

54% in favor of impeaching Cheney

Libby Commutation Response

from HinesSite.com

Biden: Flood the White House with calls
I call for all Americans to flood the White House with phone calls tomorrow expressing their outrage over this blatant disregard for the rule of law. 202-456-1414
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T H E L A T E S T
White House won't rule out pardon
The White House on Tuesday declined to rule out the possibility of an eventual pardon for former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. But spokesman Tony Snow said, for now, President Bush is satisfied with his decision to commute Libby's 2 1/2-year prison sentence.
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Poll: Just 21% of Americans agree with Bush's action
A new SurveyUSA instant poll finds just 21% of Americans agree with President Bush's decision to commute Scooter Libby's prison sentence, 60% say Bush should have left the judge's prison sentence in place, and 17% wanted a full pardon.
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Anger, outrage
Bush commuted a 30 month jail term imposed on a former top White House aide for lying to federal investigators, sparking outrage from opposition Democrats.
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Editorials hit Libby's get out of jail free card
The bloggers, politicians and TV pundits weighed in quickly Monday after President Bush took the surprisingly sudden step of commuting Libby.
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Cheney, conservatives put the pressure on Bush
Bush was under pressure from the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and other conservatives to commute the two-and-a-half year jail sentence imposed last month.
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'Shocking disrespect for justice system'
President Bush’s commutation of a pal’s prison sentence counts as a most shocking act of disrespect for the U.S. justice system.
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Prosecutor challenges Bush assertion about Libby sentence
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is disputing President Bush's assertion that the 30-month prison sentence given to former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby was "excessive."
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Richardson: Libby protected Bush, Cheney
"Will the president also commute the sentences of others who obstructed justice and lied to grand juries, or only those who act to protect President Bush and Vice President Cheney?"
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Reid: This is disgraceful
"Disgraceful." That's what Senator Harry Reid is calling President Bush's decision to spare Lewis Libby from a 2.5 year prison term.
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Pelosi: Bush has betrayed the American people
The President’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence does not serve justice, condones criminal conduct, and is a betrayal of trust of the American people.
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Edwards: A president clinically incapable of understanding
“Only a president clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences could take the action he did today.
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Schumer: Completely tramples principle of equal justice
New York Senator Chuck Schumer says the decision "completely tramples" on the principle of "equal justice under the law."
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Obama outraged by Bush's action
"This is exactly the kind of politics we must change so we can begin restoring the American people's faith in a government that puts the country's progress ahead of the bitter partisanship of recent years."
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Valerie Wilson's attorney reacts
"Clearly, this is an administration that believes leaking classified information for political ends is justified and that the law is what applies to other people."

Libby's Sentence Commuted

Another piece of shit decision by a piece of shit president.