Sung in the style of Goodnight, Irene, and if you need a vocalist the one I’m hearing in this jivester head of mine sounds just like Willie Nelson.

Good Name Dragged Through the Mud Blues

(opening is chanted)
Mud, mud, mud, mud
Mud, mud, mud, mud
Mud, mud, mud, mud
Mud, mud, mud, mud

You can fling it, you can sling it
You can bake yourself a muddy pie
You can wrassle in it, with no hassle in it
Mud is the best you can buy  Read more 

Coincidence? You be the judge. What’s clear is that, as is typical of Bush’s operations, the program was run without regard to the law. The Christian Science Monitor:

The $42 million cutting-edge [ADVISE] system, designed to process trillions of pieces of data, has been halted and could be canceled pending data-privacy reviews, according to a newly released report to Congress by the DHS’s own internal watchdog.

Data mining to help fight the war on terror has become an accepted, even mandated, method to provide timely security information. The DHS operates at least a dozen such programs; intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense employ many others.

But ADVISE (Analy­sis, Dissemina­tion, Visu­ali­zation, Insight and Semantic Enhance­ment) was special. An electronic omnivore conceived in 2003, it was designed to ingest information from scores of databases, blogs, e-mail traffic, intelligence reports, and other sources, government documents and researchers say.

How reassuring. (And it would certainly work for domestic politics, too, eh?)

So, what could go wrong?  Read more 

Vis a vis lambert’s post re Alberto’s Wet Earth Name Trauma I offer up footage that is the proof behind President Bush’s description of poor Alberto’s plight…the video is a bit pixilated, but you…can…just…make…it…out—yes! We can see it! It’s Alberto Gonzales’ good name, being dragged through the mud, holding on for dear life. Hang in there, Alberto’s good name! You show them mud draggers what you’re made of! ++++

(Torture room at Abu Ghraib)

His “good name” dragged through the blood.  Read more 

Spiky again:

The Senate Judiciary Committee, for example, has already planned a hearing next month featuring the first public testimony of former Office of Legal Counsel chief Jack Goldsmith. A one-time administration stalwart, he became convinced that Gonzales and other administration officials were breaking the law in eavesdropping on conversations of U.S. residents without judicial warrants, according to multiple former department officials.

Thereby causing Gonzo to “visit” Ashcroft in his hospital bed:  Read more 

Reading Drudge’s sock puppets over at Politico, it would seem so:

The acting attorney general will be Solicitor General Paul Clement, who can stay in the job for months, administration officials said.

The administration is now planning for a nominee who will be confirmed by the Senate and serve until the end of the administration. An individual may serve in an acting capacity for 210 days. However, if there is a pending nominee, the 210-day “clock” is reset at Day One when the nominee is announced. The clock is reset again if the nomination is withdrawn or fails.

Nice spin on “now,” don’t you think? Why all the arithmetic?  Read more 

Alberto & George, seen here taking up space

Below please find a wee set of lyrics, inspired by Rude Pundit and the Good Folks at TPM.

I suspect this song starts out with a blues harmonica solo (the late, great Paul Butterfield comes to mind…) quickly followed by a defiant Muddy Waters-style declarative…yeah, Muddy’s gone too, but he still brings it…

On Behalf of the President

on behalf of the president
let me tell you this
something might have happened
something I might have missed

maybe he sent me
out into the night
maybe he didn’t
maybe I might

it could have been sort of
some sense, as it were
just following orders
i’m just not that sure

(chorus)
the attorney general
king of the law
stand high on the mountain
stand high and stand tall
stand high and stand tall
stand high and stand tall
the attorney general
king of the law  Read more 

From Max’s:

“With respect, it is with much regret that we are forced down this unfortunate path which we sought to avoid by finding grounds for mutual accommodation,” White House counsel Fred Fielding said in a letter to the chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees. “We had hoped this matter could conclude with your committees receiving information in lieu of having to invoke executive privilege. Instead, we are at this conclusion.”

Translation: Fuck off! I’m The Decider.  Read more 

Hearing kabuki from Republicans on Gonzales lies…

Listening to the extremely smarmy Abu G being “interrogated” by Republicans—which for some reason, gosh, what, NPR is reinforcing its suckitude by running first—and they’re all focusing fucking news conferences!

What an obvious diversionary tactic!  Read more 

At C&L, Anonymous Liberal provides a strong line-up of questions that members of Congress should ask A-Gonz on Thursday.

Right now, please send your representative a link to AL’s questions, so s/he has them handy for this week’s hearings.

While the TPM community are meritorious in the extreme, I’m afraid the Amazin’ Froomkin has the right of it:

Last night’s 3,000-page Justice Department document dump, still dribbling out into the public domain, appears to be a much more carefully screened release than the smaller but newsier one last week.

In barely acknowledging the White House role in the highly controversial, possibly politically-motivated firing of eight U.S. attorneys, these new documents may best be described as a lot of chaff, intended to deflect attention from evidence in the previous dump that the purge originated at the White House, was executed by the White House, and was extensively discussed with White House aides.

But leave it to The Good Glenn to find the pure gold in that chaff:  Read more 

Snicker:

Asked if Gonzales will stay, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said Monday: “We hope so. He has the [dreaded vote of] confidence of the president.” But Snow also revealed [unintentionally, I’m sure!] that Bush had not talked to Gonzales since a conversation the two had when Bush was in Mexico last week.

Translation: “Nice knowin’ ya, pal!”  Read more 

I am referring to your formulation about Darrell Issa in your post of yesterday, to wit, that it takes a Republican to tell the truth about Bush corruption, i.e., to use the word “lie.”

Are you seriously proposing that Democrats have lagged behind the GOP, or even any individual Republican congress persons, in pursuing what the firings of those eight US Attorneys is all about?

Probably not.

Then why indulge in a rhetorical formulation that “Dean” Broder, himself, would feel completely comfortable propagating, and has, and will do again - that it takes a Republican to have the guts to criticize Bush, or other Republicans. Yeah. Like it takes a supporter of Bush’s invasion of Iraq to rightly and justly criticize the unremitting and quite possibly inescapable quagmire he’s created there. Those critics who saw what was coming and said so and tried to stop it from happening can never be considered to be making legitimate observations.

Is it really possible that you don’t get what Issa is doing with his readiness to use the “lie” word to describe Gonzales’s performance in front of congress? Representative Issa, who represents a conservative area of Caifornia, which is still, despite its San Diego and Orange Counties, a Democratic state, is trying to get ahead of this burgeoning scandal by narrowing the focus of the inquiry.

Allow me to allow Issa himself to spell it out for you.  Read more 

Sad, sad. Is there no loyalty, no honor, among Republicans?

“I do have confidence in AG Al Gonzales,” Bush said during a joint news conference with President Felipe Calderon in Merida, Mexico. “I talked to him this morning, and we talked about his need to go up to Capitol Hill and make it very clear to members in both political parties why the Justice Department made the decision it made.”

This is a lot like a baseball owner’s dreaded “vote of confidence” in a manager, isn’t it?

Translation: Nice knowing ya, pal!

Is there no gratitude?  Read more 

Is there any doubt that Alberto Gonzales’s favorite phrase in the whole wide world is “at the pleasure of the President”?

Not that he invented it, but it seems to fill him with lusty visions of an unstoppable unitary Executive, as his eyes roll back in his head like A Clockwork Orange’s Alex dreaming of the old ultraviolence.

Just sayin’.

Well, that should lay these rumors of discrimination to rest! And really, Abu G. was right on this “routine personnel matter,” give him credit: After all, in corporate America, firing everybody is routine!

No, but seriously folks, why is that, no matter how hard I try, and I do try, I’m never cynical enough about the Bush administration? It’s not the Mayberry Machiavellis, it’s the Mayberry Sopranos! The mind reels. And the mind also reels that Pravda on the Potomac put this on A1, instead of burying it on A18:

The White House suggested two years ago that the Justice Department fire all 93 U.S. attorneys, a proposal that eventually resulted in the dismissals of eight prosecutors last year, according to e-mails and internal documents that the administration will provide to Congress today.

All 93? Oh. My. Fucking. Gawd. Where did they think they were going to find 93 replacements?

Hmmm, let me see… 50 states, 50 RNC chairs, plus 50 RNC assistants… Yeah, that’s the ticket! And every one of those megachurches has a high-powered lawyer who knows how to keep his mouth shut to pay off the male hookers (Haggard 1:1) and deal with those pesky molestation eruptions….

Gonzales approved the idea of firing a smaller group of U.S. attorneys shortly after taking office in February 2005. The aide in charge of the dismissals — his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson — resigned yesterday, officials said, after acknowledging that he did not tell key Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information [lying] to Congress.

Nice of Sampson to fall on his sword like that. I’m sure he’ll get “taken care of” in some winger think tank toot sweet. As soon as he gets out of jail, has his conversion to Christianity, does the book deal, etc.

So who, you may ask, originated this idea? To rephrase: What Good Soldier in the White House is going to give The Boy King plausible deniability on this one? Wait for it—  Read more