From the Associated Press, September 14, 1999:

"The federal prosecutor who raised questions about a possible Justice Department cover-up in the Waco standoff was abruptly removed from the case along with his boss, according to a court filing made public today. Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder recused U.S. Attorney James W. Blagg in San Antonio and assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston in Waco from any further dealings in criminal or civil proceedings related to the siege. Holder appointed the U.S. attorney in a neighboring district as a 'special attorney to the U.S. attorney general.' . . . Johnston wrote Reno warning that aides within her own department were misleading her about federal agents' roles. The recusal notice provides no explanation for Holder's action."

The link is here: http://www.mcsm.org/waco18.html

No it's not an authoritative news site, but I assume it didn't make up an AP story out of whole cloth.

And much as folks might like to make excuses for what Holder said after 9/11, there's no excuse for what he said after Columbine about limiting speech on the Internet:

"The court has really struck down every government effort to try to regulate it. We tried with regard to pornography. It is gonna be a difficult thing, but it seems to me that if we can come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact on the Internet, that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look at."

Link here from Declan McCullagh's Politchbot site: http://www.politechbot.com/p-00374.html

Still feeling good about this guy?

It was Holder, as U.S. Attorney in D.C., who chose not to prosecute Ira Magaziner when he told the bald-faced lie that only federal employees belonged to Hillary's health care task force. (It was in fact rife with insurance industry types.) Holder's rationale? No one ever wrote down what "membership" in the task force actually meant.

No doubt Dick Cheney remembered this when he formed his energy task force.

Schumer belongs to that rarefied caucus of senators who are awful on foreign policy, awful on civil liberties, yet somehow pass themselves off successfully as "liberals." Feinstein and Mikulski also come to mind. Any I'm missing?

Yes, the wingers are being hoisted by their own petard. But a close reading of the document -- and a disinterestedness borne of contempt for both major parties -- leads me to conjecture that it was carefully crafted to provoke.

Unlike similar documents that have shown up on the state level, there's no mention of support for the Constitution, or opposition to the income tax, or even the United Nations. But it does hit on the two right-wing hot buttons of abortion, and especially immigration.

So mainstream conservatives can easily see themselves in this document, because it doesn't conflate them with principled civil libertarians of the Ron Paul persuasion. Even more so because in ten pages, not one organization is singled out by name.

So again, it leads me to speculate that this was purposely designed to provoke. If it was, Drudge took the bait, complete with a picture of Janet Napolitano as Janet Reno stand-in.

If it was a provocation, the question is why? And why now?

Rep. Lynn Woolsey is on record as saying the White House threatened to "withdraw support" from antiwar freshman Dems.

Doesn't matter which branch of government he's operating from; Rahm's never met a war he doesn't like and has a proven track record of doing everything in his power to cut the legs out from under antiwar Dems.

And why on earth was the IMF funding so important to some of the Democrats? As Dean Baker pointed out today, most IMF lending these days is to Central European nations... thus the money will flow straight to the coffers of the Western European banks who made foolish loans to them. Guess it was all about scoring cheap points against Republicans.

This particular misuse of the word "terrorism" has a long and sorry history going all the way back to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in '83...

http://www.counterpunch.org/bovard10082003.html