Letters to the Editor
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Shooter Once Again Displays His Ignorance
"All very true, but OTOH it is required if the very same people who bemoan the ineffectualness of the Feds during Katrina want action. It may be Democrat politics as usual for Governors to deny entry of the National Guard to New Orleans..."
Would you mind telling us what Governor denied entry of National Guard to New Orleans after Katrina?
Hint: It wasn't Blanco.
Shooter, you are truly an Ass.
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"September" is now inoperative, eh?
So. Petraeus is to "report" in September, but only because he's being forced to against his will. We already know what he will say, because for all intents and purposes, he's said it. And he will keep on saying it.
(Side note: On the Hewitt show yesterday, a substitute Republican shill mentioned the efforts by "the left" to discredit Petraeus, specifically mentioning the criticism he has received for going on the Hewitt show (Andy Sullivan came in for severe excoriation), and the claim was made that Petraeus has "made himself available" to all the media, wants to be interviewed, yadda, yadda, but "the left" isn't taking him up on it, hasn't asked him to come on the air to give a mission overview, etc. Poor Gen, sitting by his phone waiting for "the left" to call. Quite a picture...)
But in a sense the "September report" has already been delivered and discounted. Odierno, the Bloody, claims that he won't know a dambed thing until November at the earliest, and he's Petraeus's #2, so I assume he's not going to give Petraeus a status update before November, therefore there's not much Petraeus can say in September he hasn't already said. And the White House apparently is asserting that January is the right time for an assessment, not before.
And of course their willing puppets will enthusiastically adopt whichever official line they are told to adopt -- or all of them at once -- and dance and cheer mindlessly, until the next directive contradicting all the others is blast-faxed, and they dance and cheer to that.
The general paralysis continues.
More and more like the Soviet Union every day.
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on the other topic of executive privilege
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902625.html?referrer=email&referrer=email
Broader Privilege Claimed In Firings
White House Says Hill Can't Pursue Contempt Cases
By Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 20, 2007; Page A01
Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.
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Anyone surprised?
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re: re: Working for the Clampdown
Shooter242: "All very true, but OTOH it is required if the very same people who bemoan the ineffectualness of the Feds during Katrina want action. It may be Democrat politics as usual for Governors to deny entry of the National Guard to New Orleans or more recently Manhattan Kansas, and then blame Bush for resulting difficulties - but this is one result of such duplicity. Democrats want faster Federal responses. This legislation is what it takes to make it happen. ..."
No, this legislation far exceeds what it would take to allow the federal government to help in case of national emergency on the scale of New Orleans.
A law could have been crafted to let the leadership of both houses quickly give the president authority to use the military to save a city. That way, we try to ensure that it is a real emergency; and only the emergency will be looked after. The law as written is everything Republicans feared that the Democrats wanted to do in the 80s. Now look, it is the Republicans who did it!
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New Definition of "Executive Privilege"
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902625.html
In a nutshell: the White House claims that executive privilege is absolute. Despite not being in the Constitution, it has magical constitutional power. Executive privilege is the ace of trumps, and must always be presumed as valid and must never be reviewed by Congress or by the courts.
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The administration claims that the law requiring the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to prosecute congressional contempt cases is unconstitutional, and therefore must simply be ignored, because asking a court to prosecute Harriet Miers (for example) for contempt would require her to use executive privilege as a defense, and executive privilege is presumptively valid, which means it can't be reviewed in court, because reviewing it in court would weaken the privilege and then it would no longer be presumptively valid.
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These claims are based on a 1984 memo by Ted Olson.
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These claims ignore two hundred years of precedent cases indicating that executive privilege absolute. For instance, most recently:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/starr050698.htm
President Is Denied Executive Privilege
By Peter Baker and Susan Schmidt
Wednesday, May 6, 1998; Page A01 -
indicating that executive privilege *isn't* absolute
oops.
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count the canards
Can you count the number of right-wing talking points internalized and assumed by this Washington Post article? By the same authors of yesterday's awful piece on how terribly unreasonable Harry Reid's all-night Senate debate was.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902627.html?referrer=email&referrer=email
As many as 70 senators have publicly expressed concerns about Bush's handling of the Iraq war. But few Republican war critics are ready to take the drastic steps that Reid and other antiwar Democrats are advocating, in particular requiring the military to meet firm withdrawal dates.
Oh, the uncivilized horror of demanding legislation that might actually make the President do something different.
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OT -- movement in Pakistan
The Pakistani Supreme Court has reinstated Chaudhry, while the military is massing for battle in Waziristan, the NWFP, and Baluchistan. Oh, and...
On Thursday, White House press secretary Tony Snow declined to rule out the possibility that the United States would carry out strikes in Pakistan.
"We never rule out any options, including striking actionable targets," he said.
Check your maps, kids. Baluchistan, like many other "stans" (Kurdistan comes to mind) straddles current international borders. And the other end of Baluchistan is in...Iran.
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It's Time
for Congress to exercise its authority and take Harriet Miers into custody and to keep her in custody until the administration recognizes and follows the Constitution of the United States of America.