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Join South Knox Bubba in a fun State of the Union Challenge with proceeds going to Habitat for Humanity.
Tune in Tuesday, Jan 20 at 08:30 pm EST to keep score...
True Majority offers a report card for you to fill out and send the President after his speech (pdf).
San Francisco's new mayor, Gavin Newsom, is gaining our esteem. In the past few days he has given San Francisco it's first woman fire chief and first woman police chief:
Mayor Gavin Newsom named Assistant Police Chief Heather Fong as his pick for interim police chief Sunday, two days after he swore in Joanne Hayes-White as the city's first woman fire chief.
If the city's Police Commission confirms the 26-year veteran's appointment this week as expected, San Francisco will have the rare distinction of having women lead its two key public safety departments.
President Bush is bragging about his human rights record, telling the New Yorker,
No President has ever done more for human rights than I have.
Billmon has the details of other President's bragging rights in this area. [New Yorker link via Hamster.]
Yale Law prof Jack Balkin of Balkinization has a great top ten list of Bush's reasons for going to Mars. Here's a few, go on over and read the rest. [link via Poor Man.]
7. Martian officials have repeatedly refused to respond when Bush accused them of possessing weapons of mass destruction.
6. Paul Wolfowitz theorizes that bringing democracy to Mars will have domino effect throughout Solar System!
5. President thinks it would be really cool to dress up in space suit and shout "Mission Accomplished!"
And our personal favorite:
3. Ashcroft suggests Mars is great place to hold enemy combatants.
VP Dick Cheney went duck hunting last week with Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia--just weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to consider a case involving Cheney's records. Shouldn't Scalia recuse himself from the case? He doesn't think so.
While Scalia and Cheney are avid hunters and longtime friends, several experts in legal ethics questioned the timing of their trip and said it raised doubts about Scalia's ability to judge the case impartially.....But Scalia rejected that concern Friday, saying, "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned."
Federal law says "any justice or judge shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might be questioned." For nearly three years, Cheney has been fighting demands that he reveal whether he met with energy industry officials, including Kenneth L. Lay when he was chairman of Enron, while he was formulating the president's energy policy.
Scalia responded in writing to a Los Angeles Times inquiry:
Scalia said: "Cheney was indeed among the party of about nine who hunted from the camp. Social contacts with high-level executive officials (including cabinet officers) have never been thought improper for judges who may have before them cases in which those people are involved in their official capacity, as opposed to their personal capacity. For example, Supreme Court Justices are regularly invited to dine at the White House, whether or not a suit seeking to compel or prevent certain presidential action is pending."
Ethics Law Prof Stephen Gillers says Scalia should have missed this year's hunt:
"A judge may have a friendship with a lawyer, and that's fine. But if the lawyer has a case before the judge, they don't socialize until it's over. That shows a proper respect for maintaining the public's confidence in the integrity of the process," said Gillers, who is an expert on legal ethics. "I think Justice Scalia should have been cognizant of that and avoided contact with the vice president until this was over. And this is not like a dinner with 25 or 30 people. This is a hunting trip where you are together for a few days."
Checkout the Washington Post story on the call by Public Citizen and other public interest groups for a special counsel to investigate Ashcroft's 2000 Senate campaign. It gets more complicated -- Bush-Cheney's deputy finance director is implicated in the scandal.
Another aspect of the case is the role of Jack Oliver, now deputy finance chairman of the Bush-Cheney '04 reelection committee. Oliver, who was executive director of Ashcroft's PAC, was deposed by FEC investigators last February because his signature appears with Ashcroft's on a controversial work product agreement under which ownership of the mailing list was transferred to the then-senator, according to documents released in December by the FEC.
Several groups are calling upon the Justice Department to initiate a criminal probe into John Ashcroft's 2000 campaign finance activities. The groups charge that Ashcroft may have committed acts of tax evasion:
Several groups Thursday urged the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Attorney General John Ashcroft's use of a political action committee mailing list during his 2000 Senate race.
The National Voting Rights Institute, Public Citizen and other groups contended in a letter that Ashcroft evaded campaign finance laws through his Senate campaign's use of a mailing list developed by his Spirit of America PAC at a cost of $1.7 million.
They also say that while Ashcroft told the Federal Election Commission he personally owned the mailing list at one point, he failed to include it on a required report to the Senate outlining his financial holdings. He may have broken tax laws by failing to report income earned from the list on his Internal Revenue Service income tax filings, they say.
You can read the groups' joint letter to to the Justice Department here. Lots more information is available at StepAsideAshcroft.
Blogger Jim Gilliam asks whether former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill should receive whistleblower protection with respect to the announced investigation into O'Neil's tendering of 19,000 pages of documents to author Ron Suskind.
Kevin Phillips' new book, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," has just been published by Viking Penguin. Read his op-ed today in the Los Angeles Times, The Barreling Bushes.
The premise:
Four generations of the dynasty have chased profits through cozy ties with Mideast leaders, spinning webs of conflicts of interest
The introduction:
As early as 1964, George H.W. Bush, running for the U.S. Senate from Texas, was labeled by incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough as a hireling of the sheik of Kuwait, for whom Bush's company drilled offshore oil wells. Over the four decades since then, the ever-reaching Bushes have emerged as the first U.S. political clan to thoroughly entangle themselves with Middle Eastern royal families and oil money. The family even has links to the Bin Ladens — though not to family black sheep Osama bin Laden — going back to the 1970s.
How these unusual relationships helped bring about 9/11 and then distorted the U.S. response to Islamic terrorism requires thinking of the Bush family as a dynasty. The two Bush presidencies are inextricably linked by that dynasty.
Read the rest of the op-ed, then order the book:
American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
Hesiod at Counterspin has the details of the new book by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in which he lambasts Bush--at one point saying that being in a cabinet meeting with Bush at the helm was like being with a blind man in a room full of deaf people.
Update: O'Neil is saying Bush planned the invasion of Iraq shortly after taking office in 2001--well before 9/11.
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) writes in an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press that Attorney General John Ashcroft's late recusal from the CIA leaks investigation leaves credibility damage:
Here we have a case where the attorney general was investigating the very White House responsible for the resuscitation of his political career. In addition, the investigation involves the political Svengali, Karl Rove, who was inextricably tied to the attorney general by virtue of receiving a staggering $746,000 for consulting on his past Senate and governor's races. It's difficult to conceive of a more blatant conflict of interest.
....In addition, by failing to appoint an outside individual with no ties to the department or loyalty to the administration, the public can have little faith the investigation will be pursued diligently and impartially. Fitzgerald may be a fine prosecutor, but at the end of the day he still owes his job to President George W. Bush.
There's lots more, go read the whole thing. [link via Buzzflash.]
Eric Muller, UNC Law Prof and author of the lawblog IsThatLegal? is still following the Rep. Howard Coble story.
Nearly a year ago, Congressman Howard Coble (R-NC) triggered a controversy when he volunteered on a radio call-in program that FDR's incarceration of Japanese Americans in 1942 was the right thing to do at the time. Coble resurrected the old canard that Japanese Americans were jailed for their own protection: "Some of them probably weren't safe on the streets," he said.
Coble is now running for re-election, no one seems to care much about his comments, and Eric says Coble is unrepentent. We care. You should too. Go read Eric.
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