Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove had the gall to call President Obama arrogant because he doesn’t stay in his place? What about the arrogance of some in the previous administration, including this political animal who should be in a cage by now?

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Some juvenile degenerate is passing this disgusting image around over the Internets. We felt a moral obligation to report it. Take that Turd Blossom.

by Glynn Wilson

Karl Rove, the former political adviser to President George W. Bush, was a no show again this morning at the House Judiciary Committee, sources say, where he once again faced a subpoena to testify under oath about his role in political prosecutions and firings from his perch in the White House for seven years.

A staff member for the committee confirmed this on the telephone, saying simply: “He did not show up.”

Republican sources say Rove is laughing his ass off and having a party in Illinois Monday night, while House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers is back in his district in Michigan and not even in Washington, D.C., even though his office said last Thursday that the deposition was still on for Monday morning.

Apparently the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has given Rove’s attorneys, the White House counsel and the Obama Justice Department another week to reach an agreement on whether Rove should be covered under “executive privilege,” and thus be immune from having to testify about his knowledge of political manipulations of justice in the U.S. attorney firings scandal and the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.

According to Scott Horton, a New York attorney and contributing writer to Harper‘s magazine, Karl Rove has stated repeatedly that he was uninvolved in the prosecution of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, and that he has no Executive Privilege to assert in this regard.

“Yet when subpoenaed to testify on this subject he refuses to appear,” Horton said. ” At this point the record is clear: Rove won’t repeat his claims about the Siegelman case under oath and subject to cross-examination. That fact is extremely revealing, and it suggests strongly that Rove’s public, unsworn comments are not truthful.”

It’s another sad day for democracy, and the press is sound asleep.

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by Glynn Wilson

We have known all along that the smoking gun was hiding somewhere, nestled down in between the cracks of all the ongoing probes of the Bush Justice Department. In fact we have known that there are way more than one smoking gun hiding in the bushes behind the misdeeds of George W. Bush’s White House — and that Karl Rove’s fingerprints are, without a doubt, all over them.

There are a few more smoking guns to chase down before we are through, all of us dedicated to disclosing the worst crimes of the Bush administration, that is, before the cowboys all ride into the sunset back to Texas.

There are still e-mail servers to chase and hidden documents to go after, material no one’s even thought to stick their noses into, yet.

But if you look closely at a couple of largely ignored reports from two of the hardest working investigative reporters digging into these stories, one of the smoking guns is right in front of our faces.

Jason Leopold with his fairly new investigative reporting site The Public Record has unearthed one of the guns, while Wayne Madsen on his proprietary Wayne Madsen Report is handling the smoke (no link available).

Leopold is now reporting that the chief of staff to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, has been cooperating with special prosecutor Nora Dannehy by providing “damaging information” on meetings and conversations between Gonzalez and former Bush political adviser Karl Rove showing direct political involvement in the decisions to fire U.S. attorneys around the country.

Sampson is said to have provided Dannehy with an important piece of evidence that bolstered her case against Gonzales: the former Attorney General was aware of and helped create a list of federal prosecutors to fire.

The list is the gun.

Gonzales testified under oath before Congress in April 2007 that he played no role in creating such a list, telling Jeff Sessions, Alabama’s junior Republican senator:

“I have searched my memory. I have no recollection of the meeting…. I don’t remember the contents of this meeting.”

But according to multiple legal sources, Leopold writes:

Sampson is said to have told Dannehy that Gonzales met regularly with White House officials in the Office of Political Affairs, headed by George W. Bush’s former senior adviser Karl Rove, about the identities of the federal prosecutors that should be placed on the list and subsequently fired.

If that turns out to be true, then it’s enough of a smoking gun to bring both Gonzalez and Rove up on charges of a criminal conspiracy. Although there are indications Ms. Dannehy is looking for a way to let them off the hook by dancing around the issue of a direct “intent” to commit a crime, and on whether the firings were indeed specifically intended to thwart public corruption cases.

Before we get to the motivation for why Ms. Dannehy might not want to pursue criminal charges against anybody from the Bush White house, there’s more.

Read the rest of this entry »

I breezed right by this headline the other day, having seen it on the wires and linked to it on the news page before. But when a friend in Knoxville mentioned it again in an e-mail message today, I chased down Jeffrey Toobin’s version of the story in The New Yorker: Hack Attack.

Key points:

There the evidence of hacking was obvious: SoapBlox.net had been redesigned, with a logo of a hand and a message that said “destroying online communities.”

Almost accidentally, Paul Preston, the owner and creator of SoapBlox, come to control a critical crossroads in the netroots nation: the informal community of progressive bloggers and online activists who now play an important role in Democratic Party politics.

“We have built this new progressive movement on a lot of volunteer labor, a shoestring budget, a lot of heart and soul, but not a lot of resources,” said Moulitsas, of the Daily Kos. “We’ve got to professionalize our movement, and we can’t rely only on labors of love, like what Paul did.”

Preston plans to assemble a bigger team and to get some backup servers. As for the hacking, he doesn’t know who did it; he has retained a lawyer. In a message on the SoapBlox home page, the vandals wrote, “Hacked By Astalavista Team.” Preston said.

This has Karl Rove’s name all over it if you ask me. We’ve been fighting the bastards down here for four years to keep them from shutting us down with blog spam and server attacks and fake reports to Internet Service Providers about harassing e-mail and every other dirty trick in the book short of hacking and taking over our sites.

Here’s my strong suggestion for activists: Contact the Obama Justice Department and raise this issue and tell them to look deep into Texas, Alabama, Florida and Paraguay for a good chunk of the hacking and spamming that goes on around here. We’ve spent some time tracking it, but not enough. If we spent all our time doing that, we would have no time for journalism.

Now for a funny technology blog rant…

Read the rest of this entry »

by Glynn Wilson

Update: Scratch that. The hearing has been postponed due to the seventh anniversary of 9/11 and the memorial dedication.

The United States House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing of the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law Thursday at noon in the “continuing investigation into the U.S. attorneys controversy and related matters,” according to the committee’s Website.

According to the TPMMuckraker, the committee will consider a citation for contempt for Bush’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey Wednesday “for his failure to supply documents in accordance with the subpoena” issued in late June.

At the Democratic National Convention a couple of weeks ago, former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman pleaded with Colorado’s congressional delegation to vote to hold Karl Rove in contempt of Congress before it adjourns for the year, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly said she would work to bring the issue up for a vote in the full House.

But informed sources who have watched this Congress in action for the past two years since the Democrats took back control as the majority in the 2006 midterm elections are not sure there is the will or the votes in an election year to uphold the law.

Chances are the Democratic leadership will poll members of Congress and find out they do not have enough votes to sustain a vote of contempt for Rove, and they will make an announcement to that effect. Alternatively, if they see political capital to be gained from forcing a vote of the full House, they may bring the issue to a vote, even if it seems destined to lose, just so that members of Congress who are sworn to uphold the law will be on the record voting not to uphold the law.

The committee voted 20-14 to hold Rove in contempt on July 30, for failing to respond to a subpoena to testify under oath before the committee. He has been accused of manipulating the Bush Justice Department for political purposes, including having a hand in the prosecution of Siegelman.

And there is ample, sworn evidence for this, as we have reported time and again. North Alabama attorney Jill Simpson signed a sworn affidavit to that effect last May, and testified under oath before the House Judiciary Committee legal staff one year ago, last September. And she has called on Pelosi to hold Rove in “inherent contempt.”

Birmingham attorney Doug Jones also testified under oath before the full committee that there is “no doubt” Siegelman’s case was “political.” Rep. Artur Davis, the Birmingham Democrat and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, has said the same.

According to Montgomery attorney Priscilla Duncan, who represents Ms. Simpson, if the full House doesn’t vote to hold Rove in contempt, there will be no reason for any American citizen to pay heed to a subpoena from Congress.

“The House has a duty to us as citizens to uphold the Constitution. If the members don’t have the spine to vote upholding the authority of their own subpoenas, they should be shamed from office,” Duncan said. “Karl Rove hasn’t been granted any executive immunity from the President in the Siegelman investigation. This is a no-brainer.”

If the House fails to follow up on this action, it will be a travesty of justice, for sure. I mean what is the job of a member of Congress if not to uphold the law? This is especially true as it relates to enforcing subpoenas to enforce Constitutional checks and balances to hold one branch of government, the executive, accountable to another, the legislative. That is their prime Constitutional directive.

“The full House must vote on the Rove contempt citation ASAP,” Siegelman said in response to an e-mail Wednesday morning while he was on his way to Tennessee to meet with former Vice President Al Gore and others.

Our editorial position is this: Any member of Congress who fails to support that effort should be impeached and removed from office. It is their duty according to their sworn oath to uphold the law and the Constitution.

Plus, if the Democrats in Congress don’t do something to weaken Karl Rove right now, he will continue to play a destructive role in the McCain-Palin campaign for president. What better way to get him out of the way for the next two months? Confiscate his little Blackberry and his cell phone and put his lying, spinning, pasty white ass in jail for contempt!

And for any other bloggers or media outlets lurking here, you can quote me on that!

We should not even be talking about Sarah Palin because it’s sexist, says John Stewart of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” after taking apart Karl Rove on his comments about GOP veep pick Sarah Palin vs. the Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, who made Obama’s short list…

Is it any wonder many people turn to the cable comedy shows for news? The networks and their talking heads are not liberal. They are just a not-so-funny joke…

Senator John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2004 who was “swift-boated” by veterans in that race, fired a broadside at McCain Wednesday on the conduct of his campaign, especially the involvement and smear tactics of Bush’s former spin master Karl Rove.

“Senator McCain, who once railed against the smears of Karl Rove when he was the target, has morphed into candidate McCain who is using the same ‘Rove’ tactics and the same ‘Rove’ staff to repeat the same old politics of smear and fear,” Kerry said. “Well, not this year, not this time. The Rove-McCain tactics are old and outworn, and America will reject them in 2008.”

Kerry also drew a comparison between the attacks on his patriotism because he opposed the Vietnam War and those on Obama for his opposition to the war in Iraq.

“Years ago, when we protested a war, people would weigh in against us saying, ‘My country right or wrong,’” Kerry said. “Our answer? Absolutely, my country right or wrong. When right, keep it right. When wrong, make it right. Sometimes loving your country demands you must tell the truth to power.

“This is one of those times,” he said. “And Barack Obama is telling those truths.”

Predicting that Republican attacks, like those that felled his presidential candidacy four years ago, will backfire against Barack Obama, Senator John F. Kerry issued a blistering critique of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, a friend whom Kerry once sounded out about being his running mate, according to the Boston Globe.

Addressing the Democratic National Convention, Kerry linked McCain to President Bush’s foreign policy, which the Massachusetts Democrat characterized as reckless and extremist, and offered the failure of his own candidacy as a map for Democrats to follow to defeat what he called the GOP’s politics of “fear and smear” and “distortion and division.”

Also, Politico is now reporting that Republican strategist Karl Rove has been involving himself in more mischief in the Republican race for president, calling Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent-Democrat, and urging him to contact McCain to withdraw his name from vice presidential consideration, according to three sources familiar with the conversation. Lieberman dismissed the request late last week, these sources agreed.

Rove Tried to Kill Lieberman VP Pick

And what does that have to do with the McCain campaign?

What did Karl Rove do while when he left the country and defied a Congressional subpoena to testify under oath before the House Judiciary Committee in the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman? Well, it turns out he was in Yalta — with the president of Georgia.

While Karl Rove was subpoenaed to testify before congress regarding the Don Siegelman case, he was on “vacation” (July 10-13, 2008 – Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine) at the 5th Annual Yalta Meeting. Also in attendance was Mikhail Saakashvili, President of Georgia. Some four weeks after this meeting, Saakashvili attempted to repatriate South Ossetia and started a war with Russia.

We report. You decide.

Would the political animal who promised the Christians to push an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage in 2004 to get George W. Bush reelected go to Yalta and sucker Saakashvili into starting a conflict with Russia just to benefit John McCain’s presidential campaign?

Nah, that would be a lefty conspiracy theory, right?

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who is on Barack Obama’s short list for Vice President, responded to former Bush political adviser Karl Rove’s criticism of himself and Richmond, Virginia, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this past Sunday.

As we reported last week, Karl ‘Turdblossom’ Rove stepped in some deep South Richmond Doodoo last Sunday on the CBS News show “Face the Nation,” and may have done more to hand the red state over to the Democrats in the 2008 election than all of the money Obama is spending to try and win the state come November.

The local reaction to Rove’s “patronizing” comments was swift and not kind, making it look like the former White House political aide Bush liked to call “turdblossom” had stepped in one gigantic pile of doodoo.

Karl ‘Turdblossom’ Rove Steps in Richmond Doodoo

Now it is clear Kaine is on the short list.

Obama Veep Choice Expected Soon