Perjury. Somewhere Fred Hiatt is crying.
***Update***
Dems have asked the DoJ Inspector General to appoint a special prosecutor. As so often seems to be the case, the IG office of a given department is where a Bushie really earns his pay.
by Tim F| 63 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
by John Cole| 33 Comments
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®
Why are we hearing about this now?
Police across the country should be on the lookout for what could be “dry runs” for a terrorist attack, the Transportation Security Administration advised after series of suspicious incidents occurred at U.S. airports.
An unclassified advisory, sent July 20 from TSA to law enforcement agencies, raised the possibility that recent activity could be “pre-attack security probes.”
CNN obtained the advisory from a government source.
The TSA downplayed the significance of the advisory in a statement released to the media following its leak.
The TSA said it was one of more than 90 bulletins sent to police in the past six months “with the intent to provide as much information as possible to our front line officers.”
“There is no intelligence that indicates a specific or credible threat to the homeland,” the TSA said.
The advisory details four incidents from the past 11 months in which screeners found unusual objects with items that could mimic bomb components in passengers’ checked or carry-on bags.
In one case last September, a couple in Baltimore, Maryland, checked a plastic bag with a block of processed cheese taped to another plastic bag containing a cell phone charger. Earlier this month in San Diego, California, a passenger checked a bag containing two ice packs covered in duct tape. The ice packs had clay in them instead of the normal blue gel.
A.) Why am I hearing about a block of cheese from nine months ago?
B.) Wouldn’t it be smarter to let the dangerous block of cheese go through, let them think their efforts at planting an explosive cheddar succeeded, and then monitor the milk product and its owners? Aren’t they now going to work on a better cheddar?
Or does this new scare have anything to do with this or this?
by Tim F| 64 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Round up all the jackalopes so they don’t spill over into the other threads.
by Tim F| 46 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Thweet. Next comes a full House vote, then the Bushie US Attorney for DC will refuse to pursue the citation. Then what? Dems will pursue Inherent Contempt if they have any balls. If they don’t, nothing. Bush officials will figure out that they can lie about everything from their last meeting with Rove to their middle name and Congress can’t do anything about it.
Place your bets in the comments.
by Tim F| 27 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
What is there left to say? Alberto Gonzales is a good enough lawyer to know better than to bullshit Congress. Yet he does it anyway. He lied. He refused to answer questions. He had no problem making a complete fool of himself. By now it should go without saying that the cabinet officer in charge of America’s law enforcement has disgraced his office.
I understand that insiders regard Gonzales as somewhat less than a genius, but I find it hard to believe that he is as profound a moron as his recent testimony lets on. The only other reason a normally functioning person would show such a callous disregard for the law and, honestly, his own legal jeopardy is if he knows that there won’t be any consequences. I doubt that he cares whether Congress manages to impeach him before the clock runs out on 1/20/09 (it would be quite a feat if they did). Anything else Congress can do will be cleared up by a pardon before he sets foot in jail.
Gonzales is quite literally acting out the scenario spelled out by the Constitution’s most prominent contemporary skeptics:
George Mason, a distinguished Virginian who refused to sign the Constitution because of its lack of a bill of rights, noted that “the President of the United States has the unrestrained Power of granting Pardon for Treason; which may be sometimes exercised to screen from Punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the Crime, and thereby prevent a Discovery of his own guilt.”
And so it is. Now that we see it in play the loophole seems pretty obvious. So why did it take this long to manifest? Dave John Rogers (um, oops) pointed out a while back that while the option was always there, pulling it off would require an almost total inability to feel shame. Once you figure out that little exploit, though, anything’s possible.
by Tim F| 51 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
Conservative activists plead with the president to refocus on getting troops out of Iraq. Sounds like someone has been thinking about Nov. 2008.
I have the same question for these guys as always: is that a veto-proof majority in your pocket? No? Then sit down and shut your yap. The president won’t do the right thing until Congress stands up and forces him to do it. As long as righties cajole, wheedle, plead, threaten but don’t act they’re just sealing their own fate when the election comes in a year and change.
by Tim F| 22 Comments
This post is in: Outrage
The emotional punchline of Michael Moore’s film comes when the film profiles civilian 9/11 rescue workers who had to hold raffles for medicine. Being volunteers, the government refused to cover their ground zero-related illnesses. It hurt to watch these guys who stood up and answered the call, who sacrificed themselves for America, discarded like yesterday’s trash. One of them described his medical limbo as if the government was just holding off dealing with his problems, waiting for him to die.
It turns out that by drawing a line between these volunteers and paid government employees, Moore didn’t go far enough.
Almost six years after the terrorist attack on New York, the federal government still does not have an adequate array of health programs for ground zero workers — or a reliable estimate of how much treating their illnesses will cost — according to a federal report released yesterday.
The report, produced by the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, concluded that thousands of federal workers and responders who came to ground zero from other parts of the country do not have access to suitable health programs.
These people represent everything that is good about America. Now, thanks to our glorious best-in-the-world health system, they lack even basic care. While a select few Americans get to choose their doctors (within the network of course) and get surgery when they want it (assuming that the claims manager, who is paid to refuse payment, approves), the heroes of 9/11 sit around without care, waiting to die.
There’s nothing particularly new about this news. Americans get turned away from hospitals every day. Patients pass on all over the country because keeping them alive costs more than delaying payment until they die. Americans like to hang up images of our heroes, pose for pictures with them and imagine in some way that we’re like them. In falling through the gaping cracks in our medical system the 9/11 first responders have indeed become quintessentially American.
***Update***
And again.
[Mike] Helms, 31, a civilian counterintelligence expert with the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group, had been sent to Iraq in 2004 to help fill a critical intelligence gap in the area known as the Sunni Triangle. While in Iraq, he lived with soldiers and ate military rations, took fire from mortar rounds and small arms, and clocked hundreds of miles manning a machine gun on the back of a Humvee.Nevertheless, his status as an Army civilian would leave him stranded in the aftermath of the June 16, 2004, attack, when the bomb hit his Humvee so hard it blew his M-60 off its turret.
In the months that followed, Helms recalled, he was denied vital care for his wounds — ranging from shrapnel in his left arm to traumatic brain injury. Forced to rely on federal workers’ compensation and turned away from regular care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals, Helms has faced years of frustration grappling with bureaucracies unprepared to help a government civilian wounded in combat.
Greatest health care in the world.
***Update 2***
Read this Washington Post story on the wonderful new trend of physcian profiling by the insurance industry. Doctors who run afoul of the algorithm get demoted to undesirable status and cost more for insured patients to visit. Yet some demoted doctors don’t have a history of poor care. Is there a problem with the algorithm? Who knows, the whole thing is proprietary.
But ask yourself a simple question – from the perspective of an insurance company, what is the most important question about a doctor? Insurance companies exist to make money. Patients might prefer doctors who offer better care, but insurance companies prefer doctors who cost them less money. It doesn’t take a genius to expect that the algorithm serves the entity that created it and keeps its details secret.