come on, ew

some of us are dial up disfunctional

don’t leave us hanging like that

is there a transcript or something ???

how about a link to an audio link ???

BALCO was Ryan’s case, but does that qualify as public corruption?

Was Ryan’s office behind the FBI investigation of Don Perata who is the Dem leader of the CA State Senate? This has dragged on forever and keeps not leading to indictments, though who knows the truth of things.

from the front page of DKOS, and the reports on chicken noodle network, it looks like abu didn’t earn any stars today

http://indictdickcheney.blogsp…..axman.html

covington & burling letter to rep. waxman re RNC e-mails

here is an easy to see jpg-set
of the response of the counsel
to the r.n.c. to rep. henry waxman’s
latest requests to preserve and
catalog white house e-mail now
residing on r.n.c. servers. . .

McKay apparently hurt someone’s feelings when he gathered support to implement the Links (sp?) system rather than continuing to wait for the many-hundred-million dollar program popular in DC to be rolled out. He was, de facto, preventing a public corruption case.

I did not get the time watch the hearings. Is there a bottom line? Does Gonzo skate or is there a chance of folks being held to account?

I think the other MO USA was from the Western District, but he resigned precisely because his wife was involved in the Blunt corruption case (some conflict of interest there, huh?). Our USA in the Eastern district (St. Louis) , Catherine Hanaway, is definitely a model USA in terms of being a loyal Bushie. I don’t think she’s been necessarily pushing Dem corruption charges though, the big political corruption scandal most recently was the R mayor of St. Peters (an R bastion)for blatantly soliciting bribes in exchange for a city contract for red light cameras.

I also know that Hanaway was appointed at the beginning of Bush’s 2nd term, I don’t really know if the previous USA was let go for not being a loyal Bushie or not. Since she’s been here, her big prosecutorial M.O. has been meth cases and child pornography. At least, that’s what I seem to remember from the news broadcasts.

But, it might be worth looking into her. She definitely was bypassed for the Blunt case given her conflicts of interest on helping with his campaign and in being the speaker of the MO house.

“it’s not solid, but one can see where either there were concerns about the 72-hour window voter registrations and absentee votes along with split districts’’.

Why can’t we set up automatic registration, viz., to the extent possible without stomping on legit privacy concerns, why can’t we have a system in which state/local governments automatically register people to vote in the districts in which they live? We would still need a system whereby citizens could discover, thru some straightforward means, whether they are in fact registered, and act to correct omissions, if necessary by same day registration. But in a country which has, among developed countries with representative governments, the worst record for voter participation, one would think it desirable to try to remove as many obstacles to voting as possible. (I realize that many R’s—and perhaps some D’s—would have a vested interest in preserving those obstacles. But if one could at least force them to say that they don’t want greater voter participation…)

Two points, FYI:

1. The Washington Post has a three-part Gonzales hearing transcript up; here’s the URL for Part 3, with Senator Whitehouse’s first round leading it off (this part links back to the first 2 parts):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..02234.html

2. Brad Friedman at bradblog.com seems to have unearthed something important, connected with USA Bud Cummins in Arkansas (and related to the Governor of Missouri), which apparently hadn’t yet come to the attention of the Senate. Namely: that Cummins was asked to leave in mid-June, 2006 just after public reports in May revealed that his office was investigating the law firm of the Bush/Cheney ’04 General Counsel (and General Counsel to Missouri Governor Blunt), and very close Rove ally and pseudo-vote-fraud-fighter, Mark â€Thor†Hearne. This may add a partisan political party-driven (and/or personal Rove friendship) motive to WH/DOJ efforts to remove Cummins which apparently hadn’t yet been identified in the case of the workload of the ED of Arkansas under Cummins (beyond the apparent political connections and possible motives of the newly-installed USA Griffin). Here’s the link to Brad’s story Thursday, which itself has further links to other aspects of this:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4429#more-4429

Ditto to Redshift – I apologize for stepping on and overlooking your preceding comment helpfully linking to the transcripts – which managed to magically appear to me only some time after I posted mine… [Must be a result of the state I’m in after spending too many hours hearing and reading endless variations of the same lie from the person now disgracing the office of Attorney General of the United States.]

The truly appalling thing about the testimony of Alberto Gonzales on 4/19 was the way he gratuitously trashed the reputations of honest, ethical, effective, and thoroughly competent public servants, in order to hide his own negligent, obstructive, and deceitful behavior behind said trashing. It has become patently obvious that most of those United States Attorneys (Ryan probably excepted) were in fact the ’cream of the crop’ across the country, yet if they had to ’go down’ to serve the political party loyalty tests and purposes of the President and his political sidekick, down they were going to go, as far as Alberto Gonzales was concerned. And the alleged ’concerns’ and ’problems’ with their â€performance†that Gonzales never had the courtesy or respect to convey to them in person, or otherwise, are his cover story for his own, and the White House’s, gross misconduct of the administration of justice in the Executive Branch. This guy should be the subject of an investigation into obstruction of justice by the very agency in which he occupies the catbird seat. Talk about a perversion of justice. Sickeningly brazen and unconscionably corrupt behavior, displayed for all the world to see Thursday; small wonder senators looked â€sad.†Gonzales tries to hide behind the accomplishments of the best in his agency with his empty and insincere rhetoric, while instituting and condoning the lowest and worst of standards with lies that cover-up the corrupt motives and means of those whose orders he chooses to unquestioningly obey.

pow wow 2:17 — very sorry, I don’t know whether you’re an attorney or not. But I know that what got this whole thing cracked open was McNulty’s testimony that the Gonzo 7 (Chiara hadn’t yet been connected) were fired for performance reasons. That was the first salvo against the integrity of attorneys, who by virtue of their profession must rely on integrity as a key asset. And this wasn’t just a defamation of their character — the kind against which attorneys regularly take action for clients — but the falseness of the claims. Carol Lam said she had no communications from DOJ-DC about immigration being a problem; if anything, DOJ-DC had defended her office’s performance, as the doc dump shows. This makes claims that her performance was poor not only defamatory but false. IANAL, but in the corporate world, this would be enough to start a wrongful discharge and/or defamation of character suit. The bulk of the members of the SJC are attorneys; they didn’t see just badmouthing by Abu G., but a gross breach of standards of professional conduct in their profession, along with the otherwise actionable damages, right under their noses, to their faces. It was completely unconscionable behavior, like watching a school-aged child having a full-body tantrum in the main aisle of the church during a wedding; it’s just not done or permitted, remove the child now. That’s why even the Republicans were unhappy with Abu; he was beyond the pale.

Abu G. should never work as an attorney again, but he probably won’t have to; he can work in one of the many wingnut welfare programs like a think tank catering to law enforcement.