During his weekly radio address Saturday, President Bush attacked Democrats for proposing excessive budgets, and threatened to veto "irresponsible tax-and-spend" budgets."
"The American people expect us to spend their tax dollars wisely, or not at all, and to pursue pro-growth economic policies that will allow us to reduce the deficit while keeping our economy strong," Bush said while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Newly released files from the lynching of two black couples more than 60 years ago contain a disturbing revelation: The FBI investigated suspicions that a three-term governor of Georgia sanctioned the murders to sway rural white voters during a tough election campaign.
The 3,725 pages obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act do not make conclusions about the still-unsolved killings at Moore’s Ford Bridge. But they raise the possibility that Eugene Talmadge’s politics may have been a factor when a white mob dragged the four from a car, tied them to a tree and opened fire.
"I’m not surprised … historians over the years have concluded the violently racist tone of his 1946 campaign may have been indirectly responsible for the violence that came at Moore’s Ford," said Robert Pratt, a University of Georgia history professor who has studied the case. "It’s fair to say he’s one of the most virulently racist governors the state has ever had."
Talmadge, who died just months after his 1946 election to a fourth term, dominated Georgia politics in the 1930s and 1940s with a mix of racism and pocketbook populism.
He came under FBI scrutiny because of a visit he made to the north Georgia town of Monroe two days before the Democratic gubernatorial primary and a day after a highly charged racial incident there, a fight in which a black sharecropper stabbed and severely wounded a white farmer. The sharecropper was one of the four people who would later be lynched.
In a report sent to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the agent in charge of the investigation said Talmadge met with George Hester, the brother of the stabbed farmer. Citing an unconfirmed witness statement, the agent said Talmadge offered immunity to anyone "taking care of negro."
While the agent dismissed the notion of Talmadge’s involvement as "unbelievable," he said it still merited investigation. Other memos raised suspicions that state employees could even have been active participants in the lynching.
FBI agents took note of the political stakes. Talmadge faced a tough challenge in the Democratic primary — which was then tantamount to the general election — and Walton County was still up for grabs.
Talmadge eventually won the county by roughly 200 votes, with overwhelming support from the Blasingame District where the Hester family lived.
In the FBI memo to Hoover, the agent cited the opinion of Monroe assistant police chief Ed Williamson, who had spotted Talmadge meeting in front of the Walton County Courthouse with the brother of the stabbed farmer.
"The opinion on Mr. Williamson’s part was that this conversation between Talmadge and Hester probably resulted in the Blasingame District going very definitely in the Talmadge column," read the memo.
Votes from small rural counties played a crucial role in Georgia’s elections then because primaries were decided by a "county unit system," similar to the electoral college, which minimized the impact of urban centers.
In fact, Talmadge’s challenger, James V. Carmichael, actually received the most popular votes but lost the election because of Talmadge’s strong support in rural areas.
I expect this news story is true. It’s certainly consistent with how things were back then, the characters involved. About the only comfort I can take when I read a story like this one is that, at least, it’s not like that anymore. It’s not right, and the holocaust of the last six years hasn’t helped anything. The anti-black racism isn’t politically correct anymore, so it hides in home schooling, and gated communities, and "white flight," and "voter fraud" campaigns. And it’s been extended to anti-Gay, anti-Hispanic, anti-Liberal open prejudices.
I’ve been obsessing for days about how they [the Administration] could have made such a huge error – going ahead with their U.S. Attorney Plan in spite of all the danger in implementing it after they lost the midterms. I keep thinking there’s something we’re missing. Some reason they made such a blunder.
In April, the White House claimed that “it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.” They also acknowledged that some of the “missing” emails may be related to the U.S. attorney scandal.
In an impassioned speech, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said at the time that the White House was lying and the emails could be recovered:
“They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” Leahy shouted from the Senate floor. “You can’t erase e-mails, not today. They’ve gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there, they just don’t want to produce them. We’ll subpoena them if necessary.”
“Like the famous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes, it appears likely that key documentation has been erased or misplaced. This sounds like the Administration’s version of ‘the dog ate my homework.’”Today, during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting, Leahy revealed that the White House does indeed have the emails, but has yet to turn them over to Congress:
The White House stonewalling the congressional investigative committees continues this pattern of confrontation over cooperation. We all remember when they first announced to us that significant e- mails that we wanted had been destroyed. They’d been lost. I stated on the floor of the Senate that it’s relatively easy to find those lost e-mails. This brought another blast from the White House, saying that I obviously had no understanding of how the Internet works and of course that couldn’t be done.
To their credit, the White House has now told me they — well, yes indeed, I was right; they were wrong. The e-mails are found. They were there in a backup system, although they have yet to give them.Now that their claim of “lost” emails has been proven false, the White House must turn them over to Congress. Claims of executive privilege are not sufficient to deny these emails to congressional investigators as the use of “Republican Party-sponsored” email addresses significantly undermines any claims to such privilege.
During a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Bradley Schlozman, the controversial former senior political appointee in the Civil Rights Division, was battered with questions about his efforts to politicize the division.
A number of those questions from senators centered on Schlozman’s efforts to purge the appellate section of the Civil Rights Division — the small, but important section that handles civil rights cases in the court of appeals. What were they getting at? An anonymous complaint against Schlozman sent to the Justice Department’s inspector general in December of 2005 spelled out the allegations. The complaint, obtained by TPMmuckraker, was filed by a former Department lawyer. You can read it here.
"Bradley J. Schlozman is systematically attempting to purge all Civil Rights appellate attorneys hired under Democratic administrations," the lawyer wrote, saying that he appeared to be "targeting minority women lawyers" in the section and was replacing them with "white, invariably Christian men." The lawyer also alleged that "Schlozman told one recently hired attorney that it was his intention to drive these attorneys out of the Appellate Section so that he could replace them with ‘good Americans.’"
The anonymous complaint named three female, minority lawyers whom Schlozman had transferred out of the appellate section (of African-American, Jewish, and Chinese ethnicity, respectively) for no apparent reason. And in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this week in response to questions from senators, the Justice Department confirmed that all three had been transferred out by Schlozman — and then transferred back in after Schlozman had left the Division.
[see huh? and one well placed rock… below]
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) revealed today that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had once again bypassed the Senate and used an obscure Patriot Act provision to appoint an interim U.S. attorney in California.
The authority Gonzales used was at the heart of the U.S. attorney scandal, and was banned in a bill that passed both chambers of Congress with strong bipartisan support earlier this year. The legislation was sent to the President for his signature on June 4. During a hearing today, Leahy blasted Bush for stalling:
That bill, the Preserving United States Attorney Independence Act of 2007, has been on the president’s desk since June 4th. Do you know it seems he just can’t bring himself to sign it? Instead, we were informed yesterday through the Justice Department that the attorney general has used the power that we voted to repeal again.
It’s almost like they live in an alternate world, as though they’re not realizing the reaction of Democrats and Republicans about this misuse of this power. That’s wrong.But now President Bush has what he wanted. Thanks to his delay, Alberto Gonzales was able to install George Cardona as an interim U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California. Tonight, the White House released a two-line statement:
On June 14, 2007, the President signed into law:
S. 214, the Preserving United States Attorney Independence Act of 2007.
Former interim U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin tearily announced Thursday that public service is, "not worth it." Griffin was named to replace Bud Cummins after Cummins was fired by the Bush administration along with seven other U.S. Attorneys.
Griffin addressed a lunchtime audience at the Clinton School of Public service Thursday, sometimes crying as he said he had no plans to return to politics. The Justice Department has drawn strident criticism from Democrats and Republicans for appointing Griffin and other replacement prosecutors without Senate hearings and is accused of inserting political partisans in those jobs.
N.C. pressed on voter listings
State, feds say rolls out of date, push changes; official says no needState and federal officials are mounting two broad challenges to the way North Carolina maintains its voter rolls, charging widespread irregularities that include votes cast under the names of dead people.
The accusations attempt to call into question the accuracy of registration records and election returns from 2004 to the present.
So far, though, the officials have not made public any evidence of irregularities, and N.C. election officials argue that the state’s maintenance of voter rolls is among the most careful and comprehensive programs in the country.
The dispute comes amid growing national attention to suspected voter fraud. The U.S. Justice Department has devoted more resources to that area — a decision that voting advocates say could disproportionately affect minorities and the poor ahead of the 2008 election.
In a letter two months ago, the Justice Department said it was reviewing North Carolina’s voter rolls and that it found irregularities in the number of people registered to vote. Similar reviews have led to lawsuits against election officials in seven other states, including Georgia.
The second broad challenge is from State Auditor Les Merritt, whose office began a review of the state’s voter rolls in January.
His staff presented preliminary findings to the State Board of Elections last week. According to the board, Merritt’s staff cited 24,821 invalid driver’s license numbers in the voter registration database, 380 people who appear to have voted after their dates of death and others who were under age 18 when they voted.
Gary Bartlett, executive director of the elections board, responded Wednesday with a stinging 10-page letter declaring many of the findings invalid. He accused Merritt’s office of misleading the elections board and of rejecting its help.
"(Y)our office appears to have a fundamental misunderstanding about the data that was reviewed or about the federal and State laws governing the voter registration process," Bartlett wrote in the letter, which he provided to lawmakers Thursday.
For example, Bartlett said, many of the people who appear to have voted after their dates of death voted absentee and then died prior to Election Day. At least some people under 18 who voted did so legally, Bartlett said, because state law allows 17-year-olds to vote in a primary election if they will be 18 the day of the general election.
Bartlett said the state’s regular maintenance of voter rolls resulted in 725,499 names removed during a recent 19-month period. Most had been inactive, moved or died.
Merritt’s office declined to provide the Observer with a copy of its findings Thursday, saying it is adjusting them based on Bartlett’s objections.
"This is a typical process we do in refining our findings," said Merritt spokesman Chris Mears.
The dispute has drawn the attention of leading state lawmakers. In an unusual move and citing only "sensitive information," Merritt used the review to persuade lawmakers last week to delay consideration of a bill that would make voting easier.
A two pronged attack alleging voter fraud coming from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Republican State Auditor is plenty suspect in 2007. It is remarkable that this kind of thing is continuing in the face of the scandal at the Department of Justice resulting in mass resignations over this very issue [Karl Rove is an Energizer Bunny]. The U.S. Attorney in Eastern North Carolina is George E. B. Holding. He was appointed in June 2006 when then U.S. Attorney Frank Whitney was elevated to a Federal Judgeship.Holding was Senate Confirmed. It is notable, however, that Holding was appointed in the year, 2006, when there was a push to get "Bushies" in place in the U.S. Attorney offices.But what I still don’t understand is why they went ahead with the Attorney firings after they lost the mid-terms. No matter how one cuts the cake, it was a mistake. Even if they were desparate to prepare for the 2008 elections, they’ve exposed their own voter fraud scheme all by themselves. It was only known by the esoteric bloggers before January. Now it’s in the public domain big time. They were due a mistake, but it’s hard to imagine they made one this big.
leg [legal] = Harriet Miers
political = Sara Taylor
communications = Dan Bartlett
"We’re a go for the US Atty plan. WH leg, political, and communications have signed off and acknowledged that we have to be committed once the pressure comes." Looks to me like there aren’t many of "we" left. All of the people who "signed off" on the firings in the White House are out of government. Everyone directly involved at the Department of Justice is out of government. Only the people behind firewalls – Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove remain. Did they just get dumb all of a sudden or is there something we don’t yet know?
The other possibility is that "reckless" means "hasn’t had a wreck yet, and doesn’t know how it feels."