In the wake of the news last week of more NSA witetap abuses that included the speculation that a member of Congress had been wiretapped, CQ Politics revealed today that Rep. Jane Harman “was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.” CQ Politics also reports that “it was Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush’s top counsel and...
Monthly Archives: April 2009
The Birchers and Billy James would have loved the tea parties
You’d think after “Maverick” McCain ran to the right and got clobbered last November, the Republicans would try to hit the comeback trail by edging toward the center. Think again. The “tea party day” tax protests were more proof, if proof were needed, that the party of Lincoln and Liberty is bound for the farthest shores of American politics. Robert Welch and the Rev. Billy James Hargis would have loved tea party day, a made-for-TV movement bankrolled by rich, right-wing...
E.P.A. Clears Way for Regulation of Warming Gases
Today, the EPA declared “carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants that threaten public health and welfare, setting in motion a process that for the first time in the United States will regulate the gases blamed for global warming.” This is a huge step forward from the Bush administration’s stonewalling on this issue. The E.P.A. said the science supporting its so-called endangerment finding was “compelling and overwhelming.” The ruling triggers a 60-day comment period before any proposed...
DoJ Releases Four Secret Bush Memos Justifying Torture
On Thursday, the Department of Justice released “four secret memos used by the Bush administration to justify torture.” The ACLU is calling for the DoJ to “appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate torture under the Bush administration.” The memos describe “brutal interrogation techniques” used by the C.I.A.: In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping...
More NSA Wiretap Abuses
The NY Times reports that the NSA “intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.” Is anyone surprised? Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been...
Incase You Didn’t Know Already
Rush Limbaugh is certifiably nuts. The tea partiers are a little more than whacked too, especially Rick Perry. And then there is the “World’s Stupidest Argument.” Sphere: Related Content
Tea Parties and More
It’s tax day today and there’s a slew of anti-tax “tea parties” being held across the country, which have been “have been co-opted by a major America political party (the RNC’s Web site allows for creating send-a-tea-bag post cards to Dem leaders) and an entire cable news channel (which has been promoting the events).” Here’s my pick for the top headline of “tea-party” day: “Anti-Obama Taxpayer Tea Parties steeped in insanity.” The Tea Party movement, more than anything else,...
Tea Bags Full of Crap
On Countdown yesterday, David Schuster, sitting in for Keith Olbermann, took “Fox News to task for so aggressively promoting the right wing’s anti-Obama tea parties,” and he “pointed out that ‘tea bagging is not a spontaneous uprising.’” Watch: Dave Johnson has a very informative post on Seeing The Forest: “A Warning About The Tea Parties.” I also highly recommend reading Joan Walsh on Salon: “Party like it’s 1995!“ In a nutshell, the bottom line is this, those tea bags...
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