1 Boring Old Man

It certainly does clarify things for me, Brad. You were lying through your frigging teeth. You still are. This letter is what’s called an evasive rationalization. You think you’ve found a way to justify bringing this suit that will keep you out of prison. That may or not be true. But what you’re avoiding answering is, "Why did you want to file this case before an election?" The question wasn’t, "Can you lie about that first, and then go to plan B and claim that you didn’t break any laws?" The question was, "Why did you want to file this case before an election?"

If you meant, "I take full responsibility for the decision to move forward with the prosecutions related to ACORN while I was interim U.S. Attorney." And it’s clear that you pushed to find a way to bring this suit before the election when you knew that that was not what was recommended – Why? Try to explain to us why it’s not what it looks like – a direct attempt to discredit Democrats before an election.

 

McKay believes his ouster was due in part to the fact that Republicans were angry that McKay did not convene a federal grand jury to pursue allegations of voter fraud related to the 2004 governor’s election in the state in which Democrat Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi by a margin of 129 votes.

McKay told me during an exclusive interview recently that there were some Republicans in his district with close ties to the White House who demanded he launch an investigation into the election and bring charges against individuals for voter fraud, despite the fact there was no evidence to support the claims of vote-rigging.

He said he believes that he was not selected for a federal judgeship by local Republicans in Washington state last year because he did not file criminal charges against Democrats for voter fraud related to the 2004 governor’s election. McKay said he felt he was not being treated fairly, and requested a meeting with then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers to discuss the issue, as well as his application for US district judge in his home state.

"I asked for a meeting with Harriet Miers, whom I had known since work I had been involved in with the American Bar Association, and she immediately agreed to see me in August of 2006," McKay told me. McKay said that when he met with Miers and her deputy William Kelley at the White House, the first thing they asked him was, "Why would Republicans in the state of Washington be angry with you?"

That was "a clear reference to the 2004 governor’s election," McKay said in characterizing Miers and her deputy’s comments. "Some believed I should convene a federal grand jury and bring innocent people before the grand jury."

"All of my actions as United States attorney had been coordinated with the Department of Justice," McKay told me. He said he explained that to Miers and Kelley, and informed them that there was no evidence of voter fraud to support launching a federal inquiry into the election.

The meeting with Miers and Kelley did not have a positive impact on McKay’s request to be appointed a judge at US District Court. Instead, McKay said it appears that he landed on the so-called list of US attorneys to be fired just a few weeks after his meeting with Miers and Kelley.

But the question that remains unanswered is who put his name on the list?

McKay said he believes it came directly from high-level officials in the White House. McKay said he believe Attorney General Alberto Gonzales knows the identity of the officials who selected the US attorneys for termination, but Gonzales has lied to Congress in order to protect the administration.

John McKay, the US attorney for western Washington state, who was fired last year along with eight other federal prosecutors, said "many eyebrows were raised" when Bradley Schlozman, a former official in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, replaced Todd Graves, the US attorney for Kansas City, Missouri, last year.

"Many US attorneys were concerned when Mr. Schlozman was appointed," McKay told me shortly after he gave the keynote address to the Beverly Hills Bar Association’s 53rd annual Supreme Court luncheon on June 5.

…

"He was the deputy in the [Justice Department’s] civil rights division, but I don’t think he had the sort of background and experience we would have expected as a United States attorney," McKay told me. "So I would say it would be true that many eyebrows were raised when he was first appointed. Of course, we didn’t know that Todd Graves had been forced to resign … and it appears that he was forced to resign at least in part because Mr. Schlozman himself was trying to push the prosecution of voter fraud cases."

Fleeting Glory in Albania

This, I am convinced, is how future generations will remember George W. Bush: as the president who abandoned our traditional concepts of justice and human rights, choosing instead a program of state-sponsored kidnapping, arbitrary detention and abusive interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding."

We will remember him for the Iraq war, of course. But I hope and believe we will give at least as much weight to his erosion of our nation’s fundamental values and basic character.

We will remember him as the president who established a prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complete with kangaroo-court military tribunals in which detainees were not allowed to see the alleged evidence against them. We will remember that long after it was clear that Guantanamo was doing serious harm to our nation’s reputation in the world — on Sunday, Bush’s former secretary of state, Colin Powell, called for the place to be shut down "this afternoon" — Bush stubbornly kept it open.

We will remember Dick Cheney not for accidentally shooting a fellow hunter but for apparently being the loudest and most strident voice inside the administration against honoring the concepts of due process and habeas corpus that define justice in civilized societies. We will remember the negligible regard he holds for the Geneva Conventions.

We will remember Alberto Gonzales not for his hapless stewardship of the Justice Department or the firings of those U.S. attorneys– well, actually, we will remember him for those things — but we’ll also remember that when he was White House counsel he dutifully provided legalistic justification for subjecting prisoners to treatment that international agreements clearly define as torture.

We will remember this whole misguided administration for deciding to wage the fight against terrorism in a manner that not only mocks our nation’s values but also draws new recruits to the anti-American cause. We will remember this White House for unwittingly helping the terrorist cause perpetuate itself.

…

Nineteen months from now, a new president will begin trying to repair some of the damage this administration leaves behind. Bushie, meanwhile, will be back on the ranch, spending his days clearing brush and perhaps daydreaming of his Albanian glory.

I’ll remember Bush’s smirks and Cheney’s sneers. I’ll remember the religious charlatans who took a religion based on love and turned it into hatred. I’ll remember the constant stream of sarcastic Talking Points that hit the streets like a hail storm, the whine of Rush Limbaugh from radios, the "dirty tricks," shuddering at the backlash of home schooling and gated communities. What I’ll remember from yesterday is Trent Lott’s dismissive speech and thirty-eight Senators voting like sheep instead of  thoughtfull, elected Legislators. But mostly, I’ll remember that I lived in a time when a cancer that started in the anti-communist, right wing witch-hunts and the racial hatred of my childhood grew to take over Washington, and the integrity that I naively assumed would prevail in our government turned out to be a fragile illusion.

I hope I’ll get to remember awakening from this nightmare…

Alexander, Lamar- (R – TN)
Allard, Wayne- (R – CO)
Bennett, Robert F.- (R – UT)
Bond, Christopher S.- (R – MO)
Bunning, Jim- (R – KY)
Burr, Richard- (R – NC)
Chambliss, Saxby- (R – GA)
Cochran, Thad- (R – MS)
Corker, Bob- (R – TN)
Cornyn, John- (R – TX)
Craig, Larry E.- (R – ID)
Crapo, Mike- (R – ID)
DeMint, Jim- (R – SC)
Dole, Elizabeth- (R – NC)
Domenici, Pete V.- (R – NM)
Ensign, John- (R – NV)
Enzi, Michael B.- (R – WY)
Graham, Lindsey- (R – SC)
Grassley, Chuck- (R – IA)
Gregg, Judd- (R – NH)
Hatch, Orrin G.- (R – UT)
Hutchison, Kay Bailey- (R – TX)
Inhofe, James M.- (R – OK)
Isakson, Johnny- (R – GA)
Kyl, Jon- (R – AZ)
Lieberman, Joseph I.- (ID – CT)
Lott, Trent- (R – MS)
Lugar, Richard G.- (R – IN)
Martinez, Mel- (R – FL)
McConnell, Mitch- (R – KY)
Murkowski, Lisa- (R – AK)
Roberts, Pat- (R – KS)
Sessions, Jeff- (R – AL)
Shelby, Richard C.- (R – AL)
Thomas, Craig- (R – WY)
Thune, John- (R – SD)
Vitter, David- (R – LA)
Voinovich, George V.- (R – OH)
Warner, John- (R – VA)

Biden, Joe- (D – DE)
Brownback, Sam- (R – KS)
Coburn, Tom- (R – OK)
Dodd, Chris- (D – CT)
McCain, John- (R – AZ)
Obama, Barack- (D – IL)
Stevens, Ted- (R – AK)

Leading Conservative Activist Seeks Punitive Damages

Judge Robert Bork, one of the fathers of the modern judicial conservative movement whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate, is seeking $1,000,000 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages, after he slipped and fell at the Yale Club of New York City.  Judge Bork was scheduled to give a speech at the club, but he fell when mounting the dais, and injured his head and left leg.  He alleges that the Yale Club is liable for the $1m plus punitive damages because they "wantonly, willfully, and recklessly" failed to provide staging which he could climb safely.

Judge Bork has been a leading advocate of restricting plaintiffs’ ability to recover through tort law.  In a 2002 article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy – the official journal of the Federalist Society – Bork argued that frivolous claims and excessive punitive damage awards have caused the Constitution to evolve into a document which would allow Congress to enact tort reforms that would have been unconstitutional at the framing:

Bush’s full comment:

QUESTION: Mr. President, I want to take you back to domestic issues again. You say the no-confidence vote [pending in the Senate today] has no bearing as to whether Alberto Gonzales remains as Attorney General. How can he continue to be effective? And it seems like you’re not listening to Congress when it comes to Gonzales, but you are listening to Congress when it comes to Peter Pace.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes, it’s an interesting comment about Congress, isn’t it, that, on the one hand, they say that a good general shouldn’t be reconfirmed, and on the other hand, they say that my Attorney General shouldn’t stay. And I find it interesting. I guess it reflects the political atmosphere of Washington. And they can try to have their votes of no confidence, but it’s not going to determine — make the determination who serves in my government….

And as to how Gonzales — first of all, this process has been drug out a long time, which says to me it’s political. There’s no wrongdoing. You know, he — they haven’t said, here’s — you’ve done something wrong, Attorney General Gonzales. And therefore, I ascribe this lengthy series of news stories and hearings as political. And I’ll make the determination if I think he’s effective, or not, not those who are using an opportunity to make a political statement on a meaningless resolution.

        sitting quietly,

          doing nothing.

            spring comes,

              and the grass grows by itself… 

Specter says he’ll vote against Gonzales

"They can have their votes of no-confidence but it’s not going to make the determination about who serves in my government," Bush said today. "This process has been drug out a long time. … It’s political."

The American Enterprise Institute
The Project for the New American Century
The Federalist Society
The National Republican Lawyers Association
The Heritage Foundation
The Hudson Institute
The Manhattan Institute

The idea of having a collective of bright people thinking together is an old one – the University, the College, a Legislature, etc. It’s the lynch-pin of science – the Pasteur Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, CERN, the Manhattan Project, ARPA, NASA, etc. The first Policy Institute in my experience was the RAND Corporation, a military policy "think tank" that started as part of Douglas Aircraft, but became independent.

But things have changed. We now have think tanks everywhere – tax exempt "institutes" that claim to have lofty, academic goals and call their members "scholars," but which function as ideological lobby groups. SourceWatch is a group that keeps up with such groups:

The nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy‘s SourceWatch website argues that think tanks are organizations "…that clai[m] to serve as a center for research and/or analysis of important public issues…are little more than public relations fronts…generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors." It calls think tanks "phony institutes where ideologue~propagandists pose as academics … [into which] money gushes like blood from opened arteries to support meaningless advertising’s suffocation of genuine debate". SourceWatch argues that a think tank’s research findings can tend to be in "…accordance with the interests of its funders." SourceWatch claims that an "…important functions of think tanks is to provide a backdoor way for wealthy business interests to promote their ideas or to support economic and sociological research not taking place elsewhere that they feel may turn out in their favor."

SourceWatch comments that while think tank’s researchers have "… titles such as "senior fellow" or "adjunct scholar," but this does not necessarily mean that they even possess an academic degree in their area of claimed expertise." SourceWatch claims that "think tanks are like universities…minus the systems of peer review and other mechanisms that academia uses to promote diversity of thought. Real academics are expected to conduct their research first and draw their conclusions second, but this process is often reversed at most policy-driven think tanks."

I don’t too much care if people who like to be with each other "hang out together." I don’t even mind rich people giving them money to "hang out together." What I object to is their being tax exempt and to their influencing our policies secretly. And this latter thing is what has happened in the last twenty years. We’re seeing it in spades in the DoJ Scandal, but it’s true of the whole Bush Administration, which is essentially a coalition of Right Wing "think tanks."

In my opinion, this is where our focus should turn. A ‘Think Tank’ with an ideological agenda would be better named a ‘Cess Pool.’ There is absolutely no reason for such organizations with a political agenda to be tax exempt. It’s a free country, but if we’re taxing corporations, and people, and retired Social Security recipients – we should tax these groups – Left and Right. They’ve earned the right to pay for the luxury of sitting around pushing their agendae. Non-Proifit should be something you have to prove. The term is incompatible with Political or Ideological. Likewise, religious organizations with a political agenda should also be taxed…

Report: U.S. Attorney Buchanan to meet with House Judiciary investigators
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
06/06/2007 09:30:44 AM EDT

U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan of Pittsburgh will meet privately Thursday with House Judiciary Committee investigators looking into the Justice Department’s firing of eight federal prosecutors last year, her attorney told a newspaper.

Buchanan’s attorney, Roscoe C. Howard J. — the former U.S. Attorney of Washington, D.C. — told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he’s representing Buchanan at the meeting in Washington.

Howard said Buchanan is cooperating with the investigation, but said it was premature to speculate about what she might be asked.

"They might go into areas that surprise us," Howard told the newspaper.

Buchanan did not immediately return a call to her cell phone, and Howard did not immediately respond to voice mail messages left at his office Wednesday. Buchanan has previously said she will not comment on the matter at least until she is interviewed by the House committee.

In addition to her duties in Pittsburgh, Buchanan directed the Justice Department’s Executive Office for United States.

…

Former White House liaison Monica Goodling testified before the committee last month that D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with Buchanan about which federal prosecutors should be asked to resign. Sampson had told House Judiciary investigators the same thing in April.