ACLU of WV at West VA Blue

After boldly standing up to The Bush administrations’ fear mongering in February, word comes that House leadership may now be working with Senator Jay Rockefeller to possibly rush a pro-telecom amnesty bill through Congress in the next few days.

Civil libertarians in the Mountain State, say no to back room deals.

The FireDogLake community is trying to do something about this.

Dems hedge on healthcare

Congressional Democrats are backing away from healthcare reform promises made by their two presidential candidates, saying that even if their party controls the White House and Congress, sweeping change will be difficult.

It is still seven months before Election Day, but already senior Democrats are maneuvering to lower public expectations on the key policy issue. …  Read more 

So when will President Hillary invite Move On to the White House? President Edwards? President Obama? Anyone? Seeing as how Move On is all outrageous and evil and worse than Hitler, a sort of left-left-wing vanguard of the extreme left. In the same way that The Freepers are hard right extremist ideologues. I’m just wondering.

5

Blazing Hyperion struck his palm and enveloped the car as we burned east towards it. The light coming over the horizon and slapped me in the face as it pounded into the windshield. Long lazy miles behind us was the border into Utah from Nevada. Las Vegas, that city of lies, was fading as an object of desire in my mind. There was still a twinge back.

Maybe even now, I need.  Read more 

So the word is that so far, Abu Goner has repeated some variation of “I can’t recall” 55 times, and the day’s not but half over. Given his role in constructing the torture memos, shouldn’t someone point out to him that if that’s good enough for the Senate, it should be a satisfactory answer for our detainees in Gitmo and around the world? The waterboarding should stop as soon as the prisoner says he “can’t recall.” PoliticsTV has recorded the first hour and more of the testimony for those who missed it.  Read more 

Click here for all the weekend reading you could want. The details:

WASHINGTON - Internal Bush administration e-mails suggest that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may have played a bigger role than he has acknowledged in the plan to fire several U.S. attorneys.

The e-mails, delivered to Congress Friday night, show that Gonzales attended an hourlong meeting on the firings on Nov. 27, 2006 - 10 days before seven U.S. attorneys were told to resign. The attorney general’s participation in the session calls into question his assertion that he was essentially in the dark about the firings.

At a news conference last week, Gonzales said that he was aware that his aides were working on a plan to fire several U.S. attorneys but that he left the details to Kyle Sampson, his then-chief of staff, and other aides. Sampson agreed on Friday to testify about his role in the firings at a Senate hearing next week.

“We never had a discussion about where things stood,” Gonzales said on March 13. “What I knew was that there was an ongoing effort that was led by Mr. Sampson … to ascertain where we could make improvements in U.S. attorney performances around the country.”  Read more 

Ho ho ho. This is going to be soooo much fun. Will the Toddler in Chief dare to veto this? I bet he will.

Senate votes to repeal secret Midnight Patriot Act provision that granted AG power to appoint interim USAtty’s without Senate confirmation:

The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to end the Bush administration’s ability to unilaterally fill U.S. attorney vacancies as a backlash to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of eight federal prosecutors.

… With a 94-2 vote, the Senate passed a bill that canceled a Justice Department-authored provision in the Patriot Act that had allowed the attorney general to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation.  Read more 

Via Ruth a great little piece that I missed in the excrementally fabulous WaPo. Here’s the fun part:

Soltz, the group’s intense 29-year-old co-founder who served in Iraq in 2003, displayed a fiery impatience with the procedural morass that has paralyzed the Senate. “I don’t need some fancy Senate talk about why they can’t vote,” he said in an interview. “We just want a vote. We need a vote that tells the president that his strategy is not working.”

In several news conferences, Soltz accused McConnell of “aiding the enemy” by allowing the Bush administration to build up troops in Iraq at the expense of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. “We are not fighting the war on terrorism, we are in the middle of a civil war,” he said, referring to Iraq. “Meanwhile, the guy who attacked this country on 9/11 is living in a cave in Afghanistan.”  Read more 

No link yet, but apparently MSNBC is reporting that Sen. Tim Johnson D-SD has had a stroke. Ironically, it seems he was very active on just that very issue while in office.  Read more 

Oh, joy. Look who’s in the news again:

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the longtime Democratic senator from Connecticut running for re-election as an independent, says the party leadership has assured him he would keep his seniority if he returns to Congress.  Read more 

Hey, kids: If you found this page while looking for a children’s book, you came to the wrong place. It has profanity in it, in response to an obscene law that was just approved by the U.S.  Read more