Thera are reports that the House leadership will be moving toward a vote on contempt citations against Harriet Meirs and Josh Bolton for their refusal to testify on the US Attorney firings scandal.
I hope that they have the balls to go through this, but I doubt it. An interesting note, contempt of congress is a crime against the congress, not against the republic, and as such is NOT covered by presidential pardons.
It appears that Mukasey’s non answer to whether waterboarding is torture may derail his nomination as attorney general.
It appears that Senators Leahy, Reid, Durbin, and Whitehouse will not support his nomination unless and until he clarifies his position.
Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has yet to schedule a vote because of this issue.
The original troubling exchange, coming after Mukasey said that torture was never constitutional on the first day of his testimony is the his response to Senator Whatehouse’s question as to whether waterboarding is torture:
“That’s a massive hedge,” Whitehouse responded incredulously. “It either is or it isn’t.”
“If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional,” Mukasey answered.
“I’m very disappointed in that answer,” Whitehouse said. “I think it is purely semantic.”
What is clear is that following his comdemnation of tortrue on the first day of testimony, someone representing Bush and His Evil Minions&trade got to him and told him that he needed to weasel.
This woman is going to jail for 10 Years.
Her name is Tiffany Sutton, and she is just 24 years old, basically a kid, and a troubled one at that, and she is going to jail because she ran out of mental health coverage.
The newspaper misses the point and goes with the sensational headline, Woman sentenced in blood-drinking sex case. (Yes, I know that it is a great hed, but still)
Here are the details you really need to know:
Houck [Suttons’s attorney] submitted a memo to the court stating that Sutton suffered physical and sexual abuse from ages 3 to 13, and she has had mental health problems since she was 14.
Sutton improved with mental health counseling and medication up until her insurance ended six months before her February arrests, Houck wrote.
According to prison health records, Sutton thought she was a vampire for the first several weeks she was in jail, Houck wrote.
No health insurance coverage for her meds, so she self medicates, and she and while drunk and stoned, convinces her 46-year old consort to let her tie him up, and then cuts him and tries to drink his blood.
Does it sound like she was in her right mind????
The judge, one David Udall*, decides that the solution is to sentence her to TEN YEARS IN PRISON.
This woman needs help, and she will not get it under the tender confinement of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
*Anyone know if he is related to the late Congressman Morris or his son Congressman Mark Udall?
It appears now that Bush and His Evil Minions™ are demanding that anyone who gets to see the domestic sypying documents approve Telco immunity. They only gave docs to the Senate Intelligence committee after arranging a quid pro quo.
The Judiciary committee, particularly Leahy and Spector, are rightly calling bullsh%$ on this.
Someone needs to stand up to Bush and to tell him to pound sand.
While you are at it, go to my Act Blue page (upper right hand corner), and give Chris Dodd some love. Maybe that will convince the Senate Dems that being a fighting liberal is a political win.
New York Times magazine has the story of lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz, the man who got the names of the detainees out of Guantánamo bay prisoners to New York offices of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
He is now in custody. Read the article.
In a military of “good Germans”, this man is a hero.
It now turns out that the CIA was so torture happy that the FBI is finding it difficult to make cases against major Al Queida operatives, and they are scrambling to find alternate evidence.
The FBI is quietly reconstructing the cases against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 14 other accused Al Qaeda leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, spurred in part by U.S. concerns that years of CIA interrogation have yielded evidence that is inadmissible or too controversial to present at their upcoming war crimes tribunals, government officials familiar with the probes said.
The process is an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which for years held the men incommunicado overseas and allowed the CIA to use coercive means to extract information from them that would not be admissible in a U.S. court of law — and might not be allowed in their military commissions, some former officials and legal experts said. Even if the information from the CIA interrogations is allowed, they said, it would probably risk focusing the trials on the actions of the agency and not the accused.
We are talking about folks like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is so guilty that it boggles the mind, but Bush and His Evil Minions™ are so enamored with torture that they tainted the evidence.
I thought that it would be impossible for Bush to screw up a prosecution worse than that of Saddam Hussein, but they are now on a path to do so with KSM.
This time, it’s a hat trick, State Senator Matt McCoy: he’s Democratic, he’s gay, and he’s in Iowa, where the first of the nation caucuses occur.
According to court documents, the government withheld from the grand jury taped conversations in which McCoy explicitly told Vasquez that he would not suffer retribution if he didn’t share his earnings. The filing also accuses the government of intercepting emails between McCoy and his attorney, as well as surreptitiously paying Vasquez to cooperate in the prosecution (even offering him a bonus if the case returned a guilty plea).
For what it’s worth, he is charged with extorting his business partner, and appears to be rooted in sharing profit on installation of alarm systems.
How the feds got involved in this…..
At least that’s what one of the fired prosecutors thinks. He believes that the IG will recommend prosecution.
FWIW, “Fredo” Gonzalez clearly thinks so too. He’s lawyered up, and he’s not saying a word to anyone.
Personally, I’d like to see him go to the Hague, not for his perjury, but for his active participation in the torture policies of Bush and His Evil Minions™. He’d get a fair trial, and it would be telecast.
You just have to love the newspeak.
I think that someone on the Bush administration got to him between day 1 and day 2 of the testimony.
Read the whole article, but it appears that the first judge was removed on the case because, on the basis that, “because he was prejudiced against the prosecution. The basis cited for this prejudice was that a California U.S. attorney had, a decade earlier, conducted an inquiry focusing on Judge Clemon’s sister.”
The judge that they selected, Judge Mark Fuller, was known to have a personal grudge against Siegelman, and he also had a CURRENT complaint of criminal activity against him with the public integrity division of the DoJ.
I believe that the status of food preservation in Copenhagen is extremely poor.
Well, the US Attorney for Minnesota starts with a swearing in that involved everything but a Blue Angels flyover, and how we have mishandling of classified documents, racist comments, and retaliation.
If there is any justice here, one hopes that she ends up in jail over this. A number of these are felonies.
Seems strikingly similar to the Siegelman case in Alabama, but this time in Mississippi.
The case fits a familiar pattern. The corruption Mr. Minor was charged with was disturbingly vague, as it was with Ms. Thompson [Wisconsin where her case was overturned on appeal as “beyond thin”], whose only “crime” was awarding a contract to the lowest bidder, and Mr. Siegelman, who was convicted for fairly routine political behavior.
We will be paying for the Damage inflicted by for years to come.
George bush wants to chop more than $1.5 billion from the COPS program and other policing initiatives.
That’s what, like 46 hours of Iraq?
But safe streets, competent and well equipped police officers, locating missing children, rehabilitation programs, that’s bad, because it’s the “evil gummint”.
If George Bush had his way, there would be no public peace officers or firefighters. His model of a society is Blackwater in Iraq.
That is all you need to hear to understand why seven boot camp guards and one nurse at the Bay County boot camp were acquitted following the videotaped beating and death of Martin Lee Anderson, a 14 year old black child.
An autopsy found he had a previously undiagnosed blood disorder. The defense argued that is what caused his death. The all-white jury agreed.
The “blood disorder” in question is Sickle Cell trait. This means that he carried one Sickle Cell Anemia gene. The effect of this condition is much like carrying one gene for Cystic Fibrosis: there are no significant effects. (Being heterozygous for Sickle Cell will increase resistance to Malaria and decrease oxygen carrying capacity by much less than 1%, and being heterozygous for CF protects against Diphtheria). The Air Force does not consider Sickle cell trait to be a reson to exclude someone from being a pilot, for example.
“You kill a dog, you go to jail,” Crump said on the courtroom steps just after the verdict was delivered. “You kill a little black boy, nothing happens.”
Welcome to Bay County, Florida.
The prosecutor (yes, the racist cracker who trumped this all up in the first place), and fellow traveller Judge J.P. Mauffrey that this entire mess is a parole violation.
I believe that the charge is “being an uppity n*****”. This is disgraceful, and Al Sharpton is right when he calls this “revenge”.
Disgraceful.
Unfortunately, under the Bush administration, there is no realistic chance of any of these folks being taken down for civil rights violations.
This is supposed to include bribery, tax fraud and obstruction of justice.
Bernard Kerik is mobbed up, and this is something that the Democrats can, and will run with. Kerik was more than Guiliani’s friend, he was someone that Rudy mentored, and promoted to high levels of responsibility. It goes directly to the Mayor’s credibility as an executive.
A company by the name of IP Innovation LLC, a subsidiary of subsidiary of a company called Acacia (a well known patent troll) has filed suit against Linux vendors Red Hat and Novell.
The patent is for a “User interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects”, something that existed in prior art and is obvious.
FWIW, Acacia also holds a patent on the “desktop”, no kidding, they just got Apple to pay money.
The recent supreme court cases which restricted patent remedies should make this interesting. Because Acacia is a patent troll, there is no damage that cannot be made right, and so there is no cause for an injunction, and here is a big surprise:
And Acacia has taken on a couple of former Microsoft employees in recent months, including Brad Brunell, who was general manager of intellectual property licensing at Microsoft until he joined IP Innovation on 1 October — just eight days before the suit was filed
So much like SCO, Microsoft’s FUD hands are all over this.
The involves the trial of four people accused of being a terrorist “cell” in Detroit. Richard Convertino suppressed documents that would help the defense during discovery, and then lied about it.
It was so egregious that he was outed by his staff, and the convictions were overturned at the request of the Justice Department.
According to the prosecution, Convertino was looking at converting a high profile conviction into a leg up in a run for Congress.
It’s good that he, and former State Department investigator Harry Smith III, are being put on trial.
As much as the Bush Administration thinks that the law is not worth the trouble, it’s the only thing protectinb us against corrupt overzealous members of the state security apparatus.
Bill Bratton, current LAPD chief, and the man who cleaned up New Yorek (not Guiliani), is saying that the federal government is abandoning its commitment to fighting crime in the United States and diverting those resources to the “Total War Against Terror“*.
“The federal government is a one-eyed Cyclops – it can only focus on one thing at a time,” said Mr Bratton, in an interview with the Financial Times. “We have to fight a two-front war on terrorism internationally and on crime at home. You cannot fight terrorism at the expense of 16,000 homicides a year.”
FWIW, that is 5 times the total deaths from 911.
He’s right.
*Check out the acronym.
It appears that he’s concerned about the fact that he is being investigated for perjury before congress.
Hey, fat-ass! If you don’t want to go to jail for perjury, don’t lie!!!!