Cheney indicted
Following an investigation into the death of a federal prisoner, Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez and a few others have been indicted for engaging in organized criminal activity. Cheney is accused of investing some $85 million in the Vanguard Group that houses federal inmates.
According to a person with knowledge of the case, the Justice Department has imposed a limit of $200 an hour or $24,000 a month on attorneys' fees. Top Justice Department attorneys generally earn no more than $100 per hour. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
Though "lawyers from the Justice Department's civil division often represent department employees who're sued in connection with their official actions," Gonzales' lawyer said that "private counsel can often be useful where (department) officials are sued in an individual capacity, even where the suit has no substantive merit."
Following Barack Obama's lead, Democrats voted yesterday for LIEberman to keep his Chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee and of an Armed Services subcommittee, but removed him as a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
So, Lieberman will be stripped of a subcommittee chair that presides over an issue where he votes with the Democrats, and left in charge of a full and subcommittee where he votes against the Democrats. That's freaking brilliant.
Thank you, Dems. I'm glad you enjoy being complicit in our nation's greatest blunders.
Though most of Bush's sordid business history was known during Campaign 2000, it attracted little attention in the mainstream press, especially compared to the news media's obsession with dissecting every comment by Al Gore for signs of exaggeration.
Even today, as George W. Bush's crony capitalism, aversion to regulation, and his trillion-dollar war in Iraq have driven the U.S. – and the world's – economy off the road and into financial quicksand, big-time journalists continue with their Bush deference. They won't put too much blame on the person who arguably should top the list of those responsible.
While the Brokaws and Friedmans might justify their behavior as a resistance to "piling on" a lame-duck President, they also are contributing to a distorted history – one that fails to identify Bush and his political/media enablers as largely to blame for this global catastrophe.
By averting their eyes from Bush and focusing so much on Obama now, the mainstream U.S. news media also clears space for right-wing media voices like Rush Limbaugh to begin writing another false narrative, blaming the financial collapse on the incoming President not on the one who has held the office the past eight years.That narrative, in turn, could restrict what an Obama administration can do once in office. That, in turn, could open the way for a possible Republican comeback in 2010, much as the GOP rebounded from Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 to win both houses of Congress in 1994.
Though the U.S. press corps is loath to examine history, especially when it reflects badly on the Bush Family, the present – and the future – might hinge on the American people finally understanding how George W. Bush and his reverse-Midas touch managed to turn a relatively golden U.S. economy to dross in just eight years.
60 Minutes attracted 24.5 million viewers for veteran correspondent Steve Croft's interview with Obama, according to preliminary figures from ratings body Nielsen.The last time the 40-year-old news magazine topped 24 million viewers was in January 1999, according to US trade journal Variety.
For the flip side of the record, I just do not think we can let General Motors, Ford and/or Chrysler go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
And that is our quandary - we are damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
http://distributorcapny.blogspot.com/2008/11/american-trabant.html
And there's this, from Barbara Ehrenreich's newest book, This Land Is
... [T]he rich get rich and the poor get poorer. To quote the Associated Press: The top 10 percent of households saw their net worth rise by 6.1 percent to an average of $3.11 million while the bottom 25 percent suffered a decline from a net worth in which their assets equaled their liabilities in 2001 to owing $1,400 more than their total assets in 2004." ... Paul Krugman reported on a study showing that those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution have been seeing income gains of only about 1 percent a year, or a total of 34% between 1972 and 2001. In that same period, those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution saw a gain of 87 percent, and those in the top .01 percent registered a gain of 497 percent. That's right: four hundred and ninety-seven percent.
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...Time shouldn't diss the not insignificant portion of the country that voted for Republican John McCain. And, specifically, they shouldn't ignore the people who were energized by the addition of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to his ticket....
It's still a free country. Media outlets still can do as they please (save for those who choose to hand over their editorial direction to one party or another). But Time would make a mistake if it ignored the Palin phenom this year just because the ticket didn't win in the end.
Obama would be wise to agree.
What's K-Lo proposing? That Time change Person of the Year to a sort of Everybody Gets a Prize Day for prominent public figures who generate a lot of enthusiasm? I can't figure it out.
K-Lo also tells us that it's unclear how Palin would have done in a head-to-head contest with Obama; informs us that Thomas Jefferson would have admired Palin; and notes that a "foreign-policy expert" who's on the current National Review cruise "showed up for a panel in a towel (but fully clothed underneath) in an act of solidarity with Palin (referencing the now debunked post-election story that she once appeared to top campaign officials in a towel)." Are other people going to imitate this now in solidarity, sort of like when Manson Family members started sporting swastikas between the eyebrows?
As for Time, its Web site, in fact, presents 25 candidates for Person of the Year, starting with Palin; there's an online vote under way, and Palin currently has the highest point total (possibly because the folksat Free Republic are trying to stuff the ballot box), although Obama is in first place because voters get to vote on a 1-to-10 scale and his vote numbers are higher on average. But this will probably change soon, and Palin will be the clear leader in the online poll. And then her cultists will cry foul when the magazine picks Obama.
Maybe they should just cut to the chase and hold a counter-inaugural at which they declare her their president, or queen, or God's Emissary, or whatever. They could all show up in towels.
The unusual joint request from the Financial Services Roundtable and the Consumer Federation of America highlighted the urgency of the situation: consumers — even those with strong credit records — defaulting at high levels on their credit cards, while banks battered by the credit crisis bleed tens of billions in red ink from the losses.
The reduction would have to be approved by U.S. Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, whose Treasury Department agency oversees national banks.
Here's an even better idea: The Federal Reserve estimates that the total of all credit card debt in the United States is $900 billion. Why not use taxpayer money to pay off all consumer credit card debt in one fell swoop?
Hey, $900 billion is a steal in comparison with the money we taxpayers are shoveling out to Wall Street, the automakers and the citizens of Iraq.
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Dickipedia: John Boehner.
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Begich defeats convicted felon Stevens: http://www.ktuu.com/Global/story.asp?S=9374831
Stevens down. Coleman and Chambliss to go.
Another jellyfish added to the collection of Dems in the Senate!
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Ingrates
Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous (our interest was the elimination of Saddam's terror-mongering, weapons-proliferating regime), and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates. That stubborn fact complicates everything.
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The votes are still being counted:
Obama: 67,065,042 (52.7%, 365 EVs) ; McCain: 58,420,587 (45.9%, 162 EVs)
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Despite formal dissents from half of the agency's 10 regional administrators, the Environmental Protection Agency "is finalizing new air-quality rules that would make it easier to build coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and other major polluters near national parks and wilderness areas." The proposal would make it so spikes in pollution during periods of peak energy demand would no longer violate the law.
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Mike Huckabee yesterday on The View
HUCKABEE: It's a different set of rights. People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that's not really the issue. I know you talked about it and I think you got into it a little bit early on. But when we're talking about a redefinition of an institution, that's different than individual civil rights.
BEHAR: Well, segregation was an institution, too, in a way. It was right there on the books.
HUCKABEE: But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge.
Ummm, Mike? 16.6 percent of all hate crimes reported by the FBI in 2007 resulted from sexual-orientation bias, and the number of hate crimes directed against gays and lesbians increased six percent from 2006. A 2007 study by the University of California, Davis, found that "nearly four in 10 gay men and about one in eight lesbians and bisexuals in the United States have been the target of violence or a property crime because of their sexual orientation."
Nice try, but this is nothing more than a shoddy attempt to conceal your deep and fundamental homophobia.
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