Latino Blogger

Gonzales resigns, the title says it all.

He was the biggest embarrassment to Hispanic Americans in the USA. Good riddance!

As usual, E. J. Dionne has it right, this time on the reasons for the Democrats’ capitulation to Bush on warrantless surveillance.

“Even some very liberal Democrats worried about the political costs of blocking action (on the FISA bill) before the summer recess. That Saturday night, the House sent the president a bill that, as a disgusted Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) put it, with just a touch of exaggeration, ‘makes Alberto Gonzalez the sheriff, the judge and the jury.’ “

If this is how the Democrats plan to act to “preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States of America” we are all doomed.

“The episode was the culmination of a shameful era in which serious issues related to national security and civil liberties were debated in a climate of fear and intimidation, saturated by political calculation and the quest for short-term electoral advantage.”

Dionne also says that Pelosi received more than 200,000 e-mails of protest for letting the bill go forward.

“The entire display was disgraceful because an issue of such import should not be debated in a political pressure cooker. It’s not even clear that new legislation was required; Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), for one, believes many of the problems with handling interceptions involving foreign nationals are administrative in nature and that beefing up and reorganizing the staff around the FISA court might solve the outstanding problems.

But if legislation was needed, there were many ways to grant necessary authority while preserving real oversight. The Democrats got trapped, and they punted. The Republicans have never met a national security issue they’re not willing to politicize. This is no way to run a superpower.”

Thanks to Congress.

Here is Colbert’s perspective:

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Impeach the traitors! Now!

…and commutes Libby’s sentence.

“President Bush commuted the sentence of former aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Monday, sparing him from a 2 1/2-year prison term in the CIA leak case.”

Disgraceful, as usual.

According to a just released Newsweek Poll Bush’s approval rating has dropped 2 points to a record low since the beginning of May, from 28 to 26%.

This 26% rating puts Bush lower than Jimmy Carter, who sunk to his nadir of 28% in a Gallup poll in June 1979.

Only Nixon, with an approval rating of 23% in January 1974, seven months before his resignation over Watergate, has a lower rating than Bush in the last 35 years.

This means that just over one in four Americans approve of the job the 43rd president is doing; while, a record 65% disapprove, including nearly a third of Republicans.

By now some of you may know that Cheney decided a couple of years ago that the Office of the Vice President “is not an ‘entity within the executive branch’ and hence is not subject to presidential executive orders.”

Cheney made this decision In 2004, when he blocked inspectors from the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives from conducting an on-site inspection of their White House office, as the ISOO was required to do under Executive Order 12958, signed by President Bush.

Henry Waxman has written a letter to the VP questioning his decision. He is also obviously worried about its national security implications since, as Waxman puts it to Cheney,

“Your office may have the worst record in the executive branch for safeguarding classified information.”

Fortunately, the office of Rahm Emanuel has come up with an excellent suggestion following Cheney;s twisted logic and has illustrated the new structure of the US government as viewed by the VP with an easy-to-red graphic:

Rahm’s statement:

“Today, we discovered that everything we learned in U.S. government class was wrong. Evidently, the Vice President does not consider himself a part of the executive branch, and therefore believes he can obstruct meaningful oversight and avoid being held accountable. If the Vice President truly believes he is not a part of the executive branch, he should return the salary the American taxpayers have been paying him since January 2001, and move out of the home for which they are footing the bill.”

Tom Engelhardt has an excellent article in TomDispatch about the delusional world in which Bush and Cheney live, and how these delusions will soon lead the American Empire to a disastrous war with Iran.
I highly recommend the article Over the Cliff with George and Dick? to everyone.

Here is a premium quote from the article:

Having long embraced a fantasy of victory, they (Bush and Cheney) now show every sign of wrapping their arms around their own Iraq defeat as if it were victory, and — with the enthusiasm of Thelma and Louise, trapped by all those cop cars — taking the only path that seems open to them. As the alternatives grow ever starker — surrender to all those “Democrat” electees, to the reporters and the critics, the cavilers and the antiwar demonstrators, the ragtag insurgents, the alien Mullahs, and even the panicked Republicans in their own ranks — what’s left but that liberating, exhilarating trip over the cliff?

Be scared, very scared!

While Bush and his propaganda machine continue to use any opportunity to push with the media the so called “surge” and at the same time blast anybody who opposes it, Sidney Blumenthal reports today in Salon that

“Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush’s escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.”

In the meantime, while more American troops die everyday in Iraq, the democratic Senate continues to debate about when to start the debate about Iraq and useless non-binding resolutions.

Let’s remind our representatives that, once upon a time, the US Congress had an opportunity to confront Lyndon B. Johnson and cut funding for another unpopular and futile war. And that this opportunity came before 95% percent of the men and women whose names appear today in the Vietnam Memorial Wall were dead.
Congress missed that opportunity. Let’s hope it does not happen again.

Do you still remember Vietnam Senator Warner?

A report in TNR says that the republicans are so desperate to hold on to a majority in the House that “the White House and Rove gang” intervened to pressure Foley to run for re-election and stay one more term.

Foley had decided in early 2006 to retire from Congress and become a K Street lobbyist.

But as things started to get ugly for the republicans and their majority status became threatened

“Rove and the GOP congressional leadership eager for every safe incumbent in the House to run for re-election, looked the other way as evidence accumulated that Mark Foley had a thing for pages. Holding onto his seat became more important than confronting him over his extracurricular activities.”

Karl Rove

Later in the year, Foley changed his mind and decided to run for re-election. When asked by a friend, What happened? Foley answered “he was being pressured by ‘the White House and Rove gang,’ who insisted that Foley run. If he didn’t, Foley was told, it might impact his lobbying career”.

Foley said

“The White House made it very clear I have to run”

According to Foley’s friend the White House told Foley that if he served for two more years it would “enhance his success” as a lobbyist.

Foley wanted out of Congress but he said that the GOP congressional leadership and the White House were scared of losing the House and the thought of two years of Congressional hearings, so he had two more years of duty.

Once again, another piece of evidence of the coverup of a sexual predator by the Gang Of Perverts only that this time the coverup reaches all the way up to the “the White House and Rove gang”.