1. Rayne says:

    It’s like the administration as a whole is trying to push the envelope on the number of ways to say FOAD just for sport.

    Hayden should never have been confirmed; this is but one of the reasons why.

  2. TomJ says:

    When are we going to have a general law which ties continued funding to responsiveness to oversight? Yes, I know, very difficult to achieve in practice. So how about this: if an oversight committee gets pissed off, they can invoke a cutoff of payments (salary, benefits and accrued time on the job) to political appointees serving under the non-complying appointee. The higher body can reverse the effect by majority vote at any time, or set some penalty in the number of days to sustain the cutoff. Somehow, I get the feeling that a lot of these repub bureaucrats actually count pennies, making them not ideological at all. So Congress could just specify that in order to get paid, you have to be responsive to what we consider to be oversight. Even if you have some rich dude as the department head, if you cut funds to all the lower level sponge-bobs, they might get upset pretty fast.

  3. P J Evans says:

    Should I be getting the impression that Hayden wants us-the-public to assume that MS Wilson sent the Ambassador to Niger? Because that’s what it sounds like the criminals-and-incompetents in DC want. (Not going there, thankyouverymuch. And while you’re ignoring subpoenas, people, you’re adding to the pressure to kick all of you out of office and throw you into a far less comfortable prison.)

  4. ab initio says:

    At what point does Waxman take the next step – whatever it may be I don’t know – in response to the middle finger to subpoenas?

  5. bmaz says:

    Well. I am shocked to say that if you read read the â€clause 11 (b)(1)(a)†referenced in House Rule X(3)(m) as cited by EW, Hayden has a better argument than I would have thought. Waxman should have the head of the House Helect Intel Committee, Sylvester Reyes, co-sign a followup letter to remove any validity of this dodge.

  6. Anonymous says:

    I’m going to be in DC for a couple of days before memorial day- do you guys know about any hearings I should go see? What’s happening between now and May 28?

  7. marksb says:

    All of these hearings will be drug out as long as the administration can drag them. I expect that each and every one of the principle targets will have to be hauled kicking and screaming into the Congressional hot seat, only to obfuscate and forget and kinda-sorta-half-assed lie to the committee, daring them to go through the whole dog and pony show once more, or twice more, or in the case of AGAG, many multiple times. And daring Waxman to DO something about the lies. Go ahead, Congressman, Make My Day.

    Except Condi, who of course is too busy hitting the Sunday TeeVee shows, running off to Syria to try and make herself look as statesmanlike as Madam Speaker, and I’m sure there’s a shoe sale somewhere…

  8. tbsa says:

    Consequences, where oh where are the consequences for the proverbial middle finger to the lawful oversight of these criminal bastards?

  9. Sailmaker says:

    What are we going to do about oversight that is not oversight? Eight people tossed into a room and gagged is not oversight for the actual intelligence of war. IANAL but I think that if these Congress folk had broken silence, they could have be prosecuted as traitors. Seriously. In time of war. The trial would have been secret because of national security, leaving no public insight into the matter. So what is a gagged Congress person to do? Rockefeller wrote a letter to himself. That was pretty weak tea in the face of the matter, sending the armed services and the treasury after lies. Maybe a Congressperson has to figure that the tree of liberty needs to be fed blood every so often.

    The Bush folk denied the OPR department security clearances, so they could not investigate. Could one go to a FISA judge to get an injuction to stop lies being fed to the American people?

    Fed obvious lies and gagged, if I were a Congressperson, i think I would have started acting strangely. As an agnostic, I would have started attending church maybe twice a day, and started seeking out the best people in the ethics profession, as publicly as possible, to draw attention to a crisis. That might not have worked. What are the remedies?

  10. freepatriot says:

    did we ever find out who was gettin small ???

    I’m glad to see that things are back to normal size around here

    but face it, one of us has a problem

    getting small can lead to other distressing behavior

    one night, me and a bunch of friends got really small …

  11. update says:

    Chairman Waxman announced the hearing with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been postponed from May 15, 2007, to June 19, 2007.