The Agenda of the Next Attorney General

On Day One of the next Attorney General's tenure, provided they're a Democrat, of course, they need to do one thing. Fire everyone the Republicans hired, whether it is legal or not, and base it on the fact that since partisanship was used to evaluate candidates, they are ineligible to continue working for the Federal Government. Issue a signing statement if someone complains. Claim Executive Privilege or the War Powers Act or something like that.

High-ranking political appointees at the Justice Department labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department's ranks, according to an inspector general's report to be released today.

The report will trace the effort to 2002, early in the Bush administration, when key advisers to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft moved to exert more control over the program to hire rookie lawyers and summer interns, according to two people familiar with the probe.

The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials. Shifting control of the program to Ashcroft's advisers prompted charges of partisanship from law professors and former government lawyers who had worked under Democratic administrations.

[SNIP]

Critics in the department had argued that hundreds of high-quality applicants had been rejected because of their ties to left-leaning nonprofit groups or clerkships with Democratic judges and lawmakers, according to correspondence at the time. One Harvard Law School graduate said that when he applied for the honors program a few years ago he was warned by professors and fellow students to remove any liberal affiliations from his résumé.

If the newly-removed individuals want to re-apply, then let them re-apply and be considered just like everyone else.

You can't let this practice go unpunished. Fire every single unqualified person who was hired because of their affiliation to conservatives, and if they want to apply for their old jobs back, consider them based on their merits and hire them back if they are qualified.

There is no way--no way--the Republicans are going to allow a Democratic administration to function in this same way, so you might as well take the Liberty University hires and throw them out on day one before they can continue to infect the government like the viral strain of shitheadedness that they carry. Not unless we beat them down into a minority of 150 House members and 20 Senators. Even then, they'll still find a way to disrupt and obstruct in order to get their way.

--WS

Siegelman is Being Beaten In Prison

We want to stress that this is from a Diary at DailyKOS. We have no idea how thoroughly vetted this story is. We hope it is not true, actually, but we relay it because of what we know to be true - that Don Siegelman is a political prisoner. --BG

I'm back, and your initial comments are the same as mine, basically. How do you know for sure? Like you, I'm not certain of the veracity of this information. I found it on a Daily Kos diary that Crooks and Liars was linking to. I've watched the comments at C&L and it's the usual trolling concern over there--people going after Siegelman and the like.

The bottom line is this--it's not whether Siegelman is guilty or not. It's about the dignity of his treatment and did he have a fair trial. If there are indications that he is not being treated with dignity and that he didn't have a fair shake, that's an outrage.

What seals the deal is the image on Crooks and Liars and on the DKOS diary, which is Siegelman forced to write a letter to someone on a printed page like it was being snuck out of the gulag--pretty powerful stuff.

As always, view with skepticism and view with a critical eye towards what could be happening.


Start spreading this around...

DailyKos:

All roads lead to Rove. That was the message scrawled as an afterthought in the lower left-hand corner of the envelope I received in yesterday’s mail. It contained a letter from an old and dear friend of mine. His name is Don Siegelman. He is the former governor of Alabama and he is being held as a political prisoner of the Bush administration in a Federal prison in Louisiana.

They don’t allow Don the luxury of stationary so he must write his letters on whatever he can find. He wrote me on a xeroxed article he wanted me to see. [..]

When I first heard of Don being prosecuted for corruption my heart sank. I didn’t know what to think. It had been years since we’d spoken and the press made it sound awful for Don (what else?). Of course I had no idea what was really going on. Now that I do I am horrified…and furious.

Don is a formidable force in Alabama politics. His friends are loyal and his supporters enthusiastic. They re-elected him Governor in the midst of a bogus corruption trial engineered by the Bush Justice Department at the behest of Karl Rove who takes orders from you-know-who. Don campaigned for re-election throughout the early phases of the trial. On election night he was declared the winner, but Karl Rove’s minions stole the election overnight by manipulating the ballots in Baldwin County. It was classic Rovian/Republican election theft. They did it with computers and electronic voting machines. Don went to bed the re-elected Governor of Alabama, and woke up an unemployed defendant. [..]

Something that has not been reported is that they have been physically beating Don. I don’t know the extent of his injuries or exactly how many times it has happened – but it has been multiple times.

There are no words for the fury I feel. This is an outrage. And it is the most un-American thing I have ever heard. I cry bitter tears of frustration and rage.

Please everyone. We have to help Don, and we have to crush these thugs and put them out of the business of perverting our democracy. We must investigate and prosecute the responsible parties, not for political reasons, but to actually serve the interest of justice. The cause of justice calls upon us to hold these criminals accountable. We must bring them to justice and stop such travesties from ever again happening in our United States of America.

A new review of evidence suggests that an aligned group of Republican interests were pressing for — and seeking to profit financially from — the trial of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman on charges of bribery, according to Sam Stein of HuffPo.

Please contact Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairmen of their respective Judiciary committees and ask them to appoint an Independent Investigator. You can also donate to Siegelman’s Defense Fund.

Filed Under: Republican Party, Scandals

Have you ever heard of a man so dangerous, he was denied blank sheets of paper in prison?

What is THAT all about???

Don Siegelman
#24775-0001
Satellite Prison Camp
Post Office Box 5010
Oakdale, LA 71463-5019

UPDATE I - Warren Street (adding image from Crooks and Liars/DKos story)

Pretty powerful image, huh? Definitely NOT appearing in the GWB presidential library.

I Hate AT&T

.

I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.

They have the worst customer service that I have ever seen. Horrible.

The very minute I have fulfilled my end of the contract I got my hardware under, I am firing them, and will never give them another dime of my money. (Hardware was the problem by the way…)

They suck that bad.

The very minute that contract expires, I am giving away the desk-top computers and going wireless internet with laptops. Fuck them.

A company that is losing market share to new technologies would do well to treat their customers a little better, one would think.

This morning I was on the phone for eight minutes trying to get past the computer to a real live person…

…only to have the computer hang up on me.

So I called back. I just kept pressing “zero” until I got a person…Who was absolutely no help. So I laid out my grievances, hoping that they do record the incoming phone calls for training purposes, because I laid out why I hate them. Calmly. The poor guy on the other end of the phone agreed with me, but there was nothing he could do.

See, the call was dual purpose...There was one coming before I discovered the hardware crash this morning, I had just been dreading making it.

For my internet service, I have to have an autopay set up, even though it is on my phone bill – and I have been a customer of AT&T pretty much my entire adult life.

What am I getting at with this rant? Well, I'm glad you asked.

I do everything I can to safeguard my bank accounts and my identity in a digital world. I set up a specific account for bills that are on automatic payments like that. Grudgingly. Send me a bill, I pay it. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But AT&T thinks they can just rejigger society to suit their corporate interests. And they have gotten away with it because they lobby politicians who don’t hold them accountable to their customers. Cooperate with the thugs in the Bush administration and turn over our emails to the NSA, and get your monopoly back…I don’t know what I hate worse – that the inmates running the asylum have made me give credence to conspiracy theories, or that there might be something to them…

Anyway…I have a specific bank account for the bills like this. I know when they are due and I make sure that the money gets to that account a day or two ahead of time. Should be good enough, right? Hah! They don’t take the money the same day every month! So they make the withdrawal five days ahead of the bill due date…and the money wasn’t there to cover it. I paid the fall tuition for grad school for four this month. I’m a bit stretched financially right now. The early withdrawal was returned, put me in overdraft, paid the second time with a hefty fee for the overdraft, and then a daily “negative balance” charge started accumulating. I was out $110 by the time I even knew about it! (And only three days had elapsed.)

This is not the same company that sent two technicians to my home on new years eve 1990, when I was coding-from-home in dBASE III for a small health information tech company. They sent me technicians so I could get my bonus for completing my project in 1990. I can’t even get someone on the phone now – they sure as hell wouldn’t send out techs on overtime. (Hell, they don’t have any to send…they are all subcontractors now.)

Why are companies allowed to arbitrarily bill their customers like that? I truly want to know. And why is the bank allowed to charge me more of what I don’t have every damned day in perpetuity? What kind of sense does that make? Anyone?

Where the fuck is the consumer protections in this country? (That was a rhetorical question. I know we don’t have any and aren’t likely to get any.)

The good news is, I hear that there is a little regional phone company called Navigator that always has a person answer the phone. I’m giving them a call on Monday for my regular phone service.

AT&T can get by without my money in the future.

.

The U.S. Attorney Scandal Hits Close to Home

Someone asked on a political discussion board that I frequent recently that now that they know about the eight U.S. attorneys who were fired for not being Loyal Bushies, the questions on that persons mind were the 85 who weren’t fired. Was it because they did play ball that they were spared?

Good question. I would like an answer to that myself.

I live in a city where the investigations into the U.S. Attorney scandal should be shining a light but hasn’t yet – although an op-ed by Joseph D. Rich, a 35 year career civil rights lawyer in the civil rights division of the DoJ in the March 30 L.A. Times was a start. He mentioned the U.S. Attorney for Western Missouri in his column yesterday.

The official website makes him sound like the great white savior and the natural-born Heir to the Movement. It is, shall we say, spun. And about as substantive as cotton candy. Mr. Rich sets us straight on Mr. Scholzman’s bona fides.

This pattern also extended to hiring. In March 2006, Bradley Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo. Two weeks earlier, the administration was granted the authority to make such indefinite appointments without Senate confirmation. That was too bad: A Senate hearing might have uncovered Schlozman's central role in politicizing the civil rights division during his three-year tenure.

Schlozman, for instance, was part of the team of political appointees that approved then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's plan to redraw congressional districts in Texas, which in 2004 increased the number of Republicans elected to the House. Similarly, Schlozman was acting assistant attorney general in charge of the division when the Justice Department OKd a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls. These decisions went against the recommendations of career staff, who asserted that such rulings discriminated against minority voters. The warnings were prescient: Both proposals were struck down by federal courts.

Schlozman continued to influence elections as an interim U.S. attorney. Missouri had one of the closest Senate races in the country last November, and a week before the election, Schlozman brought four voter fraud indictments against members of an organization representing poor and minority people. This blatantly contradicted the department's long-standing policy to wait until after an election to bring such indictments because a federal criminal investigation might affect the outcome of the vote. The timing of the Missouri indictments could not have made the administration's aims more transparent.

I live here. I vote here. There are two “Blue” areas in this state, and I live in one of them. In fact, State Senate 10, which I call home, is the most liberal area in the most liberal U.S. House district in the entire state.

When a new U.S. Attorney showed up last March, and didn’t do his star turn in front of the Senate, some of us sniffed the air, and we did smell something - but it was new and different and we didn't recognize it as dangerous.

The trial balloon floated away, unmolested.

When we pointed out the discrepancy in the way the new U.S. attorney was rushing to publicize investigations (we had read the Rove playbook, after all, and specious investigations into politicians his candidates faced, and their supporters, is a long-time favorite of his – a veritable fallback position) we were told we were being partisan and hypocritical.

And while we were still questioning the rushed ACORN indictments, he shamelessly did it again, off the national radar, just weeks later!

He filed a mortgage fraud charge against former County Executive Katherine Shields as she was running in the mayoral primary last winter. Shields was never my candidate, but I sure as hell didn’t want her eliminated by a specious indictment that has suddenly gone nowhere since she was eliminated from the field.

There is plenty of reason to believe that the United States Attorney for Western Missouri has acted in ways intended to influence the outcome of elections, and his actions have consistently favored the Republican party in statewide election contests.

Shields was considered a strong candidate for the Mayors office, and a potential Democratic contender on a statewide ballot in the future. She had already been elected county-wide to the County Executive position – twice – and without that indictment, it would most likely have been a very different primary. It is not inconceivable that we would have sent her to Jefferson City or Washington D.C. in the not-too-distant future, had her political career not hit the shoals with that indictment.

The entire dynamic of the primary changed with just one headline. Her entire career was undermined, if not destroyed, with one suspiciously-timed headline.

I don't presume to speak for anyone but myself, but I get really, really pissed off when my rights as a citizen to participate in free and fair elections is abrogated by political hacks who would subvert the entire United States Department of Justice to favor one party.

If Mr. Schlozman was put in that position – with no Senate oversight – to influence elections in the bluest parts of a red state - MY red state - and that is what it looks like from here – then our Missouri elected officials - Claire, Reverend Cleaver, I’m talking to you here – and you too, Robin Carnahan, you are the Secretary of State and the official in charge of elections in this state – owe it to us, the citizens, to open investigations into the goings on in the office of the U.S. Attorney for Western Missouri.

[Cross posted from Watching Those We Chose]

All roads lead to Rove

McLatchy is reporting that a confluence of factors are all pointing to the Bush administration improperly using the law enforcement capacity of the Department of Justice to influence electoral politics.

And of course, this, like all roads, leads to Rove.

Since 2005, McClatchy Newspapers has found, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division when it was rolling back long-standing voting rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.

Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was research director for the Republican National Committee. He's denied any wrongdoing.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the four U.S. attorneys weren't chosen only because of their backgrounds in election issues, but “we would expect any U.S. attorney to prosecute voting fraud.”

Now the Bush administration’s emphasis on voter fraud is drawing scrutiny from the Democratic Congress, which has begun investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys - two of whom say that their ousters may have been prompted by the Bush administration’s dissatisfaction with their investigations of alleged Democratic voter fraud.

The administration's interest in replacing some U.S. attorneys, in voter fraud and in voting rights has sometimes had a political tinge, however.

Bush has acknowledged hearing complaints from Republicans about some U.S. attorneys’ “lack of vigorous prosecution of election fraud cases,” and administration e-mails have shown that Rove and other White House officials were involved in the dismissals and in the choice of an aide to Rove to replace one of them. Nonetheless, Bush has refused to permit congressional investigators to question Rove and others under oath.

Congress can not back down. They have to take whatever measures are necessary to restore justice and to restore Justice. If that means they have Rove picked up by the Capitol Police and delivered to the well of one or both chambers, so be it. the rogue Rove must be reined in.

Administrations come and go, but Congress is forever. If these jackals don’t void the entire American system. I for one am not willing to stand idly by while that happens.