Fuck Cheney…

Olbermann: U.S. Future Depends on Torture Accountability?

In the waning days of the Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney launched a last-ditch campaign to persuade his boss to pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby — and was furious when President George W. Bush wouldn’t budge, according to the New York Daily News.

Sources close to Cheney told the Daily News the former vice president repeatedly pressed Bush to pardon Libby, arguing his ex-chief of staff and longtime alter ego deserved a full exoneration – even though Bush had already kept Libby out of jail by commuting his 30-month prison sentence.

“He tried to make it happen right up until the very end,” one Cheney associate said.

In multiple conversations, both in person and over the telephone, Cheney tried to get Bush to change his mind. Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the federal probe of who leaked covert CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity to the press.

Several sources confirmed Cheney refused to take no for an answer. “He went to the mat and came back and back and back at Bush,” a Cheney defender said. “He was still trying the day before Obama was sworn in.”

After repeatedly telling Cheney his mind was made up, Bush became so exasperated with Cheney’s persistence he told aides he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further.

The unsuccessful full-court press left Cheney bitter. “He’s furious with Bush,” a Cheney source told The News.

Better watch out Georgie. Cheney tends to shoot his friends with birdshot. He’s liable to use double ought buckshot on you, man.

The Alabama Democratic Party is calling on the Republican Congressional campaigns of Wayne Parker in District 5 and Jay Love in District 2 to reimburse Alabama taxpayers for the full travel and security costs of Vice President Cheney’s brief fundraising trip Thursday to Huntsville.

Some smart activist placed this “Impeach Bush” sign over the Interstate in Huntsville on the day Bush was to visit.

President George W. Bush was scheduled to appear. Instead, he got stuck in Washington, D.C., where he was holed up with his economic advisers formulating a plan to nationalize the banking industry and dole out $900 billion in corporate welfare to failing banks and insurance companies.

While President Bush’s visit to the state was originally supposed to include a tour of a waste-to-energy steam plant in Huntsville, Vice President Cheney was in Alabama only long enough to hold a closed-door fundraiser for Parker and Love.

“It is not fair for Alabama taxpayers to pick up the tab so that Wayne Parker and Jay Love can have Dick Cheney in for a closed-door fundraiser to help fill their campaign coffers,” said Jim Spearman, Executive Director of the Alabama Democratic Party. “At a time when middle class Alabama families are being squeezed and our country’s economy is facing a crisis, the last thing Wayne Parker and Jay Love should be doing is bringing Vice President Cheney in for a private party and asking the taxpayers to foot the bill.”

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), a non-partisan government agency tasked with monitoring federal spending, calculates the cost to operate Air Force Two at about $60,000 per hour. Beyond that, there are costs for the security detail required, including the time served by Alabama law enforcement officers during the motorcade procession.

“With people at the fundraiser paying $10,000 for a picture, these campaigns can certainly find a way to make sure the hard-working taxpayers of our state aren’t shouldering any of the financial burden here,” Spearman said.

Bush Cancels Huntsville Visit, Sends Cheney Instead

The Washington Post is now reporting that Vice President Dick Cheney made a speech today before the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank and he’s once again trying to cajole Congress into permanently extending the Protect America Act, which is set to expire Feb. 1, and to update and renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which the Bush White House has largely ignored in its drive to spy on innocent Americans in a massive electronic fishing expedition to try and identify so-called terrorists.

Cheney is also continuing the call for immunity from lawsuits for telecommunications companies that assisted the U.S. government’s electronic surveillance efforts after Sept. 11, 2001.

“There is no sound reason to pass critical legislation like the Protect America Act and slap an expiration date on it,” Cheney reportedly said. “The challenge to the country has not expired over the last six months. It won’t expire any time soon, and we should not write laws that pretend otherwise.”

He said the law governing the secret electronic surveillance of “terrorist suspects” should be made permanent and “not merely extended with another sunset provision.”

In a letter today to President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid,(D-Nev.) requested White House support for a 30-day extension of the Protect America Act to “ensure that important intelligence gathering activities continue without interruption while we work to strengthen the legal framework for such activities.”

Reid said Congress “has worked diligently” on permanent legislation, with the House passing a version in November and two Senate committees approving their own versions. “But it now appears doubtful that a final bill can be negotiated and passed by both Houses prior to the February 1 expiration date,” Reid wrote.

He noted that he proposed a short-term extension yesterday but that “unfortunately, Senate Republicans objected.”

“Congress is working on a bipartisan basis to provide our intelligence professionals with the tools they need to combat terrorism, while protecting the privacy of law abiding Americans,” Reid said in the letter. “The legislative process on this critical issue should neither be rushed, nor tainted by political gamesmanship.”

The Protect America Act, passed in August 2007, permits U.S. intelligence to monitor the communications of persons “reasonably believed to be outside the United States” without a court order or oversight. It continues to require an order from the secret FISA court for such surveillance when the targeted person is in the United States. The act also protects third parties from private lawsuits stemming from assistance they provide to the government’s intelligence collection efforts.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) objected to the extension.

The White House favors a bill passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, although it says it “has some concerns” with provisions that would “impose undue operational burdens” on the collection of “foreign intelligence information on U.S. persons.”

The administration strongly opposes a House bill, H.R. 3773, that it says would severely limit the ability to collect intelligence on persons outside the United States and would expire in December 2009.

According to a White House fact sheet, the administration also objects to the House bill on the grounds that it “does nothing to aid companies facing multibillion-dollar lawsuits for assistance they allegedly provided following the 9/11 attacks” and would “impose burdensome oversight requirements.”

A number of congressional Democrats and civil liberties groups oppose the Protect America Act’s provisions as unwarranted intrusions into the privacy of Americans.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which calls the law the “Police America Act,” argues that it “allows for massive, untargeted collection of international communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts.” The ACLU says the law “contains virtually no protections for the U.S. end of the phone call or e-mail, leaving decisions about the collection, mining and use of Americans’ private communications up to this administration.”

Read the full Washington Post story here

Also:

Here Comes The National Surveillance State

AT&T Looking at Internet Filtering

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich lived up to his word today and introduced articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. I’m not sure why he didn’t go ahead and include President George W. Bush in the resolution, but it is an effort that seems doomed to fail anyway.

That’s too bad, because there is ample evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors mentioned in the Constitution to have long ago impeached them both.

Go here to read and learn more about Kucinich’s House Resolution 333 to Impeach Dick Cheney.

Update

In an interesting ad and update to this story, the National Lawyers Guild voted today to advocate the impeachment of Cheney and Bush and in a press release, the organization lists more than a dozen crimes and misdemeanors worthy of impeachment.

National Lawyers Guild Votes for Impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney

As we have been saying for years, how many scandals does it take? How many crimes does it take? Apparently, since the Democrats in the majority in both houses of Congress simply will not act, we may have to replace this entire government and start over…

Not sure how that can be accomplished. Any Jeffersonian ideas?

Three well-placed sources tell investigative reporter Wayne Madsen that Vice President Dick Cheney, while a part-time resident of McLean, Virginia and while serving as Halliburton’s CEO, was a customer of the DC Madam.

U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Gladys Kessler, a Clinton appointee, has re-issued an order prohibiting DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey from releasing any more phone lists of her Pamela Martin & Associates customers. Secrecy of the phone records has been a priority for DC Assistant US Attorney William Cowden.

Palfrey released her 10 years of customer phone records to ABC’s “20/20″ before Kessler’s March order prohibiting such a release took effect. As Madsen reported, ABC and Disney, under pressure from the Bush White House, killed the story and stated that there were no “newsworthy” names on the Madam’s list.

Hmmm…

Makes the BBQ taste better on Saturday – knowing the Republicans won’t be able to win a race for dogcatcher in 2008.

Wait ’till the photos show up of Jeff Gannon with Scotty McClellan and who knows who else in the Lincoln bedroom…

Only in Alabama can you get on one of the top rated radio shows in the state and not get ANY significant new traffic to your Website.

Our appearance on the Finebaum show last week was a total bust. The traffic did not go up ANY, and in fact, it may have gone down a little bit.

This can only be explained in one of three ways.

One, Finebaum’s old audience has not figured out where he is on the radio dial yet.

Two, Finebaum’s audience get all their news from talk radio and do not own computers or know how to find LocustFork.Net on the Web.

Three, Finebaum does not have an audience yet, perhaps because there’s no big sports news going on. While Florida won the national college basketball championship, perhaps there are not enough basketball fans in Alabama to care enough to tune in to talk radio to hear about it.

Only in Alabama can the vice president of the United States get a standing ovation for holding out for “victory” in a war that has already failed.

Birmingham, Alabama must be one of the last outposts in the country where a few rich people will give Vice President Dick Cheney a standing ovation, period.

Cheney Gets Standing Ovation at The Club in Birmingham

Although there is some indication that about 100 rich Republicans are catching on to what’s going on in the world. While the official word from Sen. Jeff Session’s campaign for re-election is that 500 people paid $1,000 each, the Associated Press reported that 100 seats were empty. Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope there.

Only in Alabama would the governor support the power company in the face of a ruling by the majority Republican Supreme Court that supports the idea that the government ought to bring auto emission standards up to par with at least a third world country – like China.

Supreme Court Ruling Could Go Against Alabama Power

High Court Rebukes Bush on Car Pollution

A quarter of all the world’s green house gases that trap heat on the planet and lead to climate change are produced in the U.S., yet our auto emission requirements under the Bush administration are the weakest in the world. American car companies cannot even sell cars in China because they can’t meet the gas mileage and emission requirements.

No wonder they can’t sell any cars down at the Jim Skinner Ford dealership.

Only in Alabama have the people totally ignored the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which tells the tale of where we are headed if the power companies and the auto manufacturers are not forced to clean up their act.

And only in Alabama are the masses so totally denied the truth by newspapers, television news stations and talk radio hosts.

Is it any wonder that the rest of the world laughs at Alabama?

About the only thing we have going for us now are a couple of American Idol finalists. We don’t even have winning football teams anymore – although that could change in Tuscaloosa over the next four years.

When is the last time Alabama produced a world class mind?

Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham in 1929, the year of the great stock market crash that led to the Great Depression.

But very few people outside of academe here have any idea who he is.

His Wikipedia page is a good place to start to find out, kids.

Think big – and get the hell out of Alabama.

It only took the better part of three days, but the bunker busting concrete stain does wonders for an underground blogging compound – not a bad place to ride out the last of the Bush years.

It’s too late to muster much in the way of wisdom tonight, tired as I am, although there was one bit of semi-good news today. The suicide bomber missed in Afghanistan, but we did learn that doctors discovered a blood clot in Vice President Dick Cheney’s left leg – a condition that could be fatal.

When there are so many examples of good things happening to bad people in Bush’s world, it’s kind of heartening to see a bad thing happen to a bad person. While normally we would express some sympathy even to our current Mr. Burns-like Veep, it’s just not in the cards today.

Maybe it’s the bunker busting concrete stain fumes…

Now if Rep. John Conyers would get those impeachment hearings going in a real Judicial Committee hearing room instead of the Capitol basement, and if the weather would go ahead and warm up like spring is here, we might care more about what’s happening elsewhere in the world.

At least there’s Yuengling in the cooler and Widespread Panic on the tape deck.

And they finally buried Anna Nicole Smith…

Dick Cheney has accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of proposing a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq that would “validate” al-Qaeda’s strategy. But captured al-Qaeda documents and other evidence indicate that if anyone is playing into al-Qaeda’s hands, it is Cheney and George W. Bush.

The chief motive behind the 9/11 attacks was to draw the United States into a clumsy overreaction that would alienate the Muslim world and rally a new generation of jihadists to al-Qaeda’s banner. Today, that banner might well read, “Mission Accomplished.”

For the full story on how Bush-Cheney may have “validated” al-Qaeda’s bloody strategy, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.