“They are playing politics with it (firing of 8 prosecutors)… that’s fine. All I ask is that everyone who is playing superheated politics with this now, take a look aback and see what they said during the 123 prosecutors that were fired in the previous administration and see what they said about that back then” – Karl Rove

Who is willing to start of this historical introspective?


Here’s your word of the day: tergiversate

CNN and its so-called "Firestorm" and "Smoking gun" "scandal" of Bush Firing Prosecutors
Congressional Democrats are in full cry over the news this week that the Administration's decision to fire eight U.S. Attorneys originated from -- gasp -- the White House. Senator Hillary Clinton joined the fun yesterday, blaming President Bush for "the politicization of our prosecutorial system." Oh, my.
As it happens, Mrs. Clinton is just the Senator to walk point on this issue of dismissing U.S. attorneys because she has direct personal experience. In any Congressional probe of the matter, we'd suggest she call herself as the first witness -- and bring along Webster Hubbell as her chief counsel.
As everyone once knew but has tried to forget, Mr. Hubbell was a former partner of Mrs. Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock who later went to jail for mail fraud and tax evasion. He was also Bill and Hillary Clinton's choice as Associate Attorney General in the Justice Department when Janet Reno, his nominal superior, simultaneously fired all 93 U.S. Attorneys in March 1993. Ms. Reno -- or Mr. Hubbell -- gave them 10 days to move out of their offices.
At the time, President Clinton presented the move as something perfectly ordinary: "All those people are routinely replaced," he told reporters, "and I have not done anything differently." In fact, the dismissals were unprecedented: Previous Presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, had both retained holdovers from the previous Administration and only replaced them gradually as their tenures expired. This allowed continuity of leadership within the U.S. Attorney offices during the transition.
Equally extraordinary were the politics at play in the firings. At the time, Jay Stephens, then U.S. Attorney in Chicago, was investigating then Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and was "within 30 days" of making a decision on an indictment. Mr. Rostenkowski, who was shepherding the Clinton's economic program through Congress, eventually went to jail on mail fraud charges and was later pardoned by Mr. Clinton.
Also at the time, allegations concerning some of the Clintons' Whitewater dealings were coming to a head. By dismissing all 93 U.S. Attorneys at once, the Clintons conveniently cleared the decks to appoint "Friend of Bill" Paula Casey as the U.S. Attorney for Little Rock. Ms. Casey never did bring any big Whitewater indictments, and she rejected information from another FOB, David Hale, on the business practices of the Arkansas elite including Mr. Clinton. When it comes to "politicizing" Justice, in short, the Bush White House is full of amateurs compared to the Clintons.
And it may be this very amateurism that explains how the current Administration has managed to turn this routine issue of replacing Presidential appointees into a political fiasco. There was nothing wrong with replacing the eight Attorneys, all of whom serve at the President's pleasure. Prosecutors deserve supervision like any other executive branch appointees.
The supposed scandal this week is that Mr. Bush had been informed last fall that some U.S. Attorneys had been less than vigorous in pursuing voter-fraud cases and that the President had made the point to Attorney General Albert Gonzales. Voter fraud strikes at the heart of democratic institutions, and it was entirely appropriate for Mr. Bush -- or any President -- to insist that his appointees act energetically against it.
Take sacked U.S. Attorney John McKay from Washington state. In 2004, the Governor's race was decided in favor of Democrat Christine Gregoire by 129-votes on a third recount. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other media outlets reported, some of the "voters" were deceased, others were registered in storage-rental facilities, and still others were convicted felons. More than 100 ballots were "discovered" in a Seattle warehouse. None of this constitutes proof that the election was stolen. But it should have been enough to prompt Mr. McKay, a Democrat, to investigate, something he declined to do, apparently on grounds that he had better things to do.
In New Mexico, another state in which recent elections have been decided by razor thin margins, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias did establish a voter fraud task force in 2004. But it lasted all of 10 weeks before closing its doors, despite evidence of irregularities by the likes of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn. As our John Fund reported at the time, Acorn's director Matt Henderson refused to answer questions in court about whether his group had illegally made copies of voter registration cards in the run-up to the 2004 election.
As for some of the other fired Attorneys, at least one of their dismissals seemed to owe to differences with the Administration about the death penalty, another to questions about the Attorney's managerial skills. Not surprisingly, the dismissed Attorneys are insisting their dismissals were unfair, and perhaps in some cases they were. It would not be the first time in history that a dismissed employee did not take kindly to his firing, nor would it be the first in which an employer sacked the wrong person.
No question, the Justice Department and White House have botched the handling of this issue from start to finish. But what we don't have here is any serious evidence that the Administration has acted improperly or to protect some of its friends. If Democrats want to understand what a real abuse of power looks like, they can always ask the junior Senator from New York.

Well, interesting that you say the "individual rights approach" to the 2nd Amend is a "made up right". Just so happens to be explicit in so many aspects of the rule of law in colonial America.

The creative "collective rights" theory, useful for advancing the policy goals of its advocates, runs contrary to the text of the Constitution, to the debates and original understanding of the Framers, to Supreme Court precedent, and to the widespread understanding of state courts and legislatures for the first 150 years of our nation's history. At the time of the founding, the "militia" was understood to consist of all able-bodied males armed with their own weapons; indeed, the Militia Act of 1792 not only permitted individual gun ownership, it required every man to "provide himself with a good musket or firelock . . . or with a good rifle." This Act is being mentioned in addition to the numerous evidence that I point out of colonial America’s various requirements that individuals bear arms. Funny how you could possibly call it a “made up right” after being informed of all this evidence. BE OBJECTIVE and don’t confuse regulating arms and the argument over individual rights vs. collective rights interpretation of the 2nd A. They are two different questions. All STATES support restrictions and regulations on arms. For example, convicted felons are not allowed to own guns.

No state in the union has a prohibition as draconian. Indeed, the constitutions of 44 states, like the federal Constitution, explicitly protect the individual right to keep and bear arms, and the legislatures of all 50 states are united in their rejection of bans on private handgun ownership. Forty-five states go even further, allowing private citizens to carry concealed handguns for self-defense.

Sen. JOHN WARNER REACTS TO GEN. PACE'S COMMENTS: "I ... STRONGLY DISAGREE WITH [HIS] VIEW THAT HOMOSEXUALITY IS IMMORAL."


Do you know that as per a Pew Research survey (march 2006) fully 88% of Americans do NOT think homosexuality is moral?

CNN Says General Pace's comments linking homosexuality is immoral is a "firestorm".

However, it seems that fully 88% of the American public will NOT state that homesexuality is moral!

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press released the results of a study in March 2006 that found that 50% of the public still think homosexual behavior is immoral, 12% think it's morally acceptable, and 33% believe it's not a moral issue. (That leaves 5% who apparently had no opinion.)

Some in the weekend media described the federal appeals court in Washington DC as interpreting the Second Amendment “broadly” when it struck down a gun control law in the District of Columbia that bars residents from keeping handguns in their homes. “The decision was the first from a federal appeals court to hold a gun control law unconstitutional on the ground that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals, as opposed to the collective rights of state militias.”, NY Times 3/10/07.
This characterization is untrue at the most, misleading at the least and tendentious either way. Here’s why:

The federal courts of appeal have often (a more suitable description of the Federal Appellate Court’s rulings so far) subscribed to the states' right approach, instead of to the individual right approach. However, they also have not agreed upon any single interpretation of the Second Amendment. The Fifth and Ninth circuits have shown different judicial thinking, tending to favor the individual and collective rights models respectively. Most (more suitable than to describe the ruling as “the first”) circuits have followed the Ninth's reading, despite these inconsistencies among the lower courts, the Supreme Court has not granted certiorari to any recent case hinging on the Second Amendment

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stated in 2001 that ”there are numerous instances of the phrase "bear arms" being used to describe a civilian's carrying of arms. Early constitutional provisions or declarations of rights in at least some ten different states speak of the right of the "people" [or "citizen" or "citizens"] "to bear arms in defense of themselves [or "himself"] and the state," or equivalent words, thus indisputably reflecting that under common usage "bear arms" was in no sense restricted to bearing arms in military service.

The U.S. Supreme Court Cases Do Not Treat the Right as a Collective Right
The U.S. Supreme Court has said little about the Second Amendment, but it has certainly not said that the Amendment secures only a collective right.
Throughout the Court's history, the Justices have mentioned the Second Amendment, usually in passing, in 27 opinions. In 22 of these 27, the Justices quoted or paraphrased only "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" language, without even mentioning the Militia Clause.
One of the remaining five cases -- and the only extended 20th-century discussion of the right -- is United States v. Miller (1939), which held that the right extended only to weapons that were rationally related to the preservation of the militia. But the Court emphatically did not hold that the right belonged only to the state or the National Guard. Rather, it reaffirmed that the "militia" referred to the entire armed citizenry, and considered on the merits a lawsuit that was brought by an individual (Miller), not by a state.
The only Supreme Court case that leans in the collective rights direction is Lewis v. United States (1980), which summarily rejected an ex-felon's claim of a right to possess a firearm, in passing citing some lower court cases that took a collective rights view. But Lewis could equally well be explained as concluding only that ex-felons don't have a right to keep and bear arms (something that's also been held in the many states whose constitutions unambiguously guarantee an individual right to keep and bear arms). In any event, if one relies on passing mentions, Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) (quoting Justice Harlan) in passing described liberty as including "[freedom from] the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on" -- a description that treats the right to keep and bear arms as an individual right on par with the other individual rights.

What the States Think
An often glaring omission by those discussing the topic…
The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is a Federal provision. Each of the Fifty States also has its own State Constitution addressing their specific state. Forty-four States have chosen to embody explicitly a right to arms into their State's Constitution, and six States have chosen explicitly not to do so.
Of the forty-four states that have chosen to embody explicitly a right to arms into their State's Constitution, approximately thirty-one have explicitly chosen to include the right to arms for 'individual right', 'defense of self', 'defense of home' or similarly worded reasons. Approximately thirteen States, as with the Federal Constitution, did not choose to include explicitly 'individual', 'self' or 'home' wording associated with a right to bear arms for their specific state. In other words, almost 2/3rds of the states view the right to arms as an “individual right”.

Finally, an interesting side-note but apropos to the discussion is the book titled “Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American As Apple Pie” by Clayton Cramer, Nelson Publishing. Up until 1969, virtually all New York City schools had riflery teams…thousands of students carried rifles on subways, buses and streets to and from schools. Up to 1963, all commercial pilots were required to carry guns and were allowed to until 1987. Today, there are towns (Kennesawy, GA, Greenfeld and Geuda Springs, KA) in the US that actually require all residents to own guns. In colonial times there were numerous laws mandating people have guns for personal defense and defense of the community –even in Church where some priests were required by law to check if parishioners were carrying! According to probate records, 70% of Americans bequeathed guns.

Replacing Federal Prosecutors? - say it ain't so!

Well, it's actually the norm in Wash DC, but the press won't tell you that. Where was all the criticism 13 years ago?

As a matter of fact, though the press is jumping all over Pres Bush and Alberto Gonzalez, what they have done is exactly 1/12th of what President Clinton and Janet Reno did….

White House Mulled Firing All U.S. Prosecutors
Former White House Counsel Harriet Miers raised the prospect of asking all chief federal district prosecutors to resign in 2004, but the Justice Department objected and only eight were dismissed. There are 93 Federal prosecutors and the Bush admin has replaced 8.
By the way, that is exactly what the Clinton Administration did:
In 1993 The New York Times published a story with this provocative lead:

“Attorney General Janet Reno today demanded the prompt resignation of all United States attorneys, leading the federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia to suggest that the order could be tied to his long-running investigation of Representative Dan Rostenkowski, a crucial ally of President Clinton.”

Rostenkowski was indicted in 1994 under the aegis of a Democratic U.S. attorney, and later pleaded guilty to corruption charges.
United States Attorneys are appointed to serve four-year terms at the pleasure of the President. It was unclear whether Reno initiated the request for resignations or whether it was pressed on her by the White House. The Attorney General said it was a "joint decision."

Did you Know?
In 1969, Robert Morgenthau, now the Manhattan District Attorney, resisted efforts by the Nixon Administration to replace him as United States Attorney in New York until he was given what he called an "ultimatum" by President Richard M. Nixon to leave office.

In the most important sense, this is a case without a crime. Yes, Mr. Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, which are serious offenses. But this seasoned, disciplined lawyer is accused of lying to cover up a leak he didn't commit, and which has long been proven not to have been a crime at all. One early bit of drama will be to see what motive prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald comes up with to explain why Mr. Libby would lie to the FBI and a grand jury when he had essentially nothing to hide.
All the more so because one of the mysteries of this case is Mr. Fitzgerald himself. He made his reputation as a tough prosecutor in Chicago who was nonetheless scrupulous about the law. But in this case, he knew from the very first day of his appointment in December 2003 that neither Mr. Libby nor the Vice President's office had orchestrated the leak of Valerie Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak.
He also knew -- based on earlier FBI interviews -- that the real leaker was Richard Armitage, the No. 2 man at the State Department and if anything a policy rival of Mr. Libby's inside the Bush Administration. The original theory of the case -- that the leak was a political vendetta against Ms. Plame's husband, Joe Wilson -- was thus demonstrably false from the start of his probe. The "crime," in short, had been solved.
Yet Mr. Fitzgerald has persisted for three long years, and only six weeks into his investigation sought and received an expansion of his authority in order to go after a senior administration official -- Mr. Libby -- who had had nothing to do with the leak Mr. Fitzgerald was investigating. And he pursued the case even to the extent of creating a Constitutional showdown over reporters and their sources. Why?
As it happens, Messrs. Fitzgerald and Libby had crossed legal paths before. Before he joined the Bush Administration, Mr. Libby had, for a number of years in the 1980s and 1990s, been a lawyer for Marc Rich. Mr. Rich is the oil trader and financier who fled to Switzerland in 1983, just ahead of his indictment for tax-evasion by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bill Clinton pardoned Mr. Rich in 2001, and so the feds never did get their man. The pardon so infuriated Justice lawyers who had worked on the case that the Southern District promptly launched an investigation into whether the pardon had been "proper." One former prosecutor we spoke to described the Rich case as "the single most rancorous case in the history of the Southern District."
Two of the prosecutors who worked on the Rich case over the years were none other than Mr. Fitzgerald and James Comey, who while Deputy Attorney General appointed Mr. Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Mr. Fitzgerald worked in the Southern District for five years starting in 1988, at the same time that Mr. Libby was developing a legal theory of Mr. Rich's innocence in a bid to get the charges dropped. The prosecutors never did accept the argument, but Leonard Garment, who brought Mr. Libby onto the case in 1985, says that he believes Mr. Libby's legal work helped set the stage for Mr. Rich's eventual pardon.
This was all long ago, it's true. But Mr. Libby and Mr. Comey tangled more recently as well. In 2004, as Mr. Fitzgerald was gearing up his investigation, Mr. Libby was the Administration's point man in trying to get Justice to sign off on the NSA wiretapping program. In early 2004, Mr. Comey was acting Attorney General while John Ashcroft recovered from gall bladder surgery, and Mr. Comey reportedly refused to give the NSA program the greenlight, prompting the White House to seek out Mr. Ashcroft in the hospital in a bid to circumvent Mr. Comey.
Motive is a difficult thing to gauge. We don't know whether this long personal history played any role either in Mr. Fitzgerald's single-minded pursuit of Mr. Libby, or in Mr. Comey's decision to grant the prosecutor plenary power even though the central mystery of the case had already been resolved. But connecting the dots linking the three men at the heart of this case seems worth doing given the puzzling nature of this prosecution.
As for the trial itself, Mr. Fitzgerald will have to prove not only that Mr. Libby knowingly made false statements but that they served some larger purpose of obstructing justice. The evidence so far is thin. At a mega-press conference announcing his indictment, the prosecutor spoke piously about the need to indict officials who throw "sand . . . in the eyes" of the "umpire." But we know Mr. Libby had nothing to cover up, and his plausible defense will be in part that his recollections simply differed from those of the journalists he spoke with about Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.
At the same press event, Mr. Fitzgerald also made comments suggesting he bought into Joe Wilson's conspiratorial theory of the case -- remarks that now look both disingenuous and prejudicial to Mr. Libby. And this week, trial judge Reggie Walton seemed to acknowledge the extensive negative pretrial publicity about Mr. Libby by granting his lawyers their request for considerable leeway in questioning jurors during voir dire. Mr. Fitzgerald's main advantage may be a Washington, D.C., jury pool inclined to dislike anyone associated with the Bush Administration.
This case is really about a political fight over the Iraq War. In talking to reporters, Mr. Libby was doing his job and attempting to defend Administration policy against political attacks. He had no evident reason to lie to the grand jury. Once Mr. Armitage had fessed up as the leaker in October 2003, a wiser prosecutor than Mr. Fitzgerald would have realized he had entered the realm of politics and gone home.-wsj, 1. 27.07

The NJ Star Ledger's editorial board in the Sunday March 4th edition recommends that the Real ID Act of 2005 be reversed. The paper uses wrong "facts" to come to a wrong conclusion.

First, the paper needs to remember that it has long advocated the Bush administration and Congress implement all the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report. The paper has backed up that opinion by continuously recommending to Jersyans that they vote for Democratic candidates for various offices that also believe the 9/11 Commission suggestions should become law. Indeed it was part of the Democrat Party's "First 100 Hours" guarantee made when Pelosi, et al. took over.
Now that is exactly what the Congress and President Bush did when they passed legislation and signed it into law in 2005. Improving document security was a central recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Its co-chairman, former New Jersey governor Tom Kean, has said that the REAL ID Act is "vital for the protection of the country.?The Star Ledger states "Many of the 9/11 ijackers had genuine driver's licenses."
But what the paper fails to mention is that, according to a new paper from 9/11 Commission counsel Janice Kephart,the hijackers obtained a total of 17 driver’s licenses and 13 non-driver IDs, seven of them by fraudulent means. At l east six of the hijackers used these IDs to board their planes. An ommission of fact that is inexcusable for such an important discussion.

Secondly, the Star Ledger erroneiously says "The Real ID Act's inflexible requirements will force states to spend more than $14 billion over the next few years, with no new federal aid to offset the expense". This is simply incorrect.
Actually, according to the Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, the National Conference of State Legislatures and the National National Governors Association,(http://www.aamva.org/About/PressRoom/PressReleases/RealIDCostStates11Billion.htm) the Real ID cost is a one-time expense "of $1 billion and ongoing costs of more than $10.1 billion for the first five-year enrollment period." No where do the above experts on the cost of the Real ID act mention the Star Leger's "$14 billion" figure.

As a matter of fact, the Bush administration just last week announced that states would also be permitted to use up to 20% of their homeland-security funds on this task. In fact, now that the DHS funding will be subsidizing and the time-frame will be spread-out over a longer period of time, the cost of the Real-ID Act are certianly manageable.

We should not be confused with erroneous analysis. The Real-ID Act is needed and needed now.

Why Not Call a Terrorist Group a Terrorist Group?

The question has to be asked this morning when one reads their NY Times newspaper: Why doesn’t the NY Times call Hamas a terrorist group?

The first paragraph of an article titled “Israeli Says Iran is Training Hamas Men” .
“The chief of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, said Monday that the Islamic movement Hamas had sent dozens of men from Gaza to Iran for military training.”
-NY Times, March 6, 2007

Actually the US Department of State lists Hamas (in Arabic, an acronym for "Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamia" -- Islamic Resistance Movement -- and a word meaning zeal) as a “terrorist group”[1] and has for many years. In fact it was on October 8, 1997 that the Clinton administration designated Hamas a terrorist organization. The Clinton administration’s most frequent foreign leader was none other than PLO Leader Yasser Arafat and so its designation of Hamas was important.

Even the European Union classifies Hamas as a terrorist group. Europe is pro-Palestine too as exemplified by France President Chirac’s wife unveiling the Palestinian flag off the President’s balcony in Paris. Also, Canada and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the Human Rights Watch all designate Hamas as a terrorist organization, so why does the NY Times describe it with the benign term “Islamic movement”?

[1] http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/fs/37191.htm