Senate passes US attorney billFollow

Well, at least some good has come of this Gonzales fiasco.Not much doubt that Pelosi & Co. will pass it through with a quickness.

The rest of the story is about the White House agreeing to let Rove, et al give "interviews" but not under oath and not transcripted. It remains to be seen if the Senate will bite on that or press on to issue supoenas. And another Pubbie, Tom Tancredo, came out to say that Gonzales should resign saying that "Alberto Gonzales has repeatedly shown that he is unwilling to enforce the law and unable to effectively manage the Department".

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d110:57:./temp/~bdDTif::

Is that the bill? I'm trying to find out the two Senators that voted no.

That's off the Senate website. Kind of interesting that two presidential hopefuls couldn't be bothered to vote on it. Johnson gets a pass (brain surgery guy) and I've no idea who the hell Mikulski is.

Edited, Mar 20th 2007 1:36pm by Jophiel

Odd, I could have sworn that District Attorneys are supposed to be impartial to politics and only be concerned with upholding the law and prosecuting those that break the law, not those that think Bush is an ok guy.

Duh, guess I should look around a bit more.

McCain may have been off campaigning or whatnot, but it's not unusual for them to miss a vote. It may have even been smart of him to do so if he didn't want to be on the record with it, although I hear the Senate considered it a foregone conclusion that it would pass when Gonzalez himself said that Bush wouldn't veto.

Barbara Mikulski, from Maryland. I'm sure she was scrapbooking.

See?

Activist Jugdes, liberal media, partisan politicians.


Those are all good but when a dem uses the same move it is 'concerning'?

Just keeping the AGAG info in one place...DOJ managed to dump over three thousand pages on Congress to sift through but neglected to include the most important time period in their communications. I'm reminded of the criticisms when Iraq waited until the last moment to dump a bajillion pages of info on the UN regarding its weapon programs.

If you're the sort to enjoy transcripts of White House breifings, today's was amusingly McClellan-esque.

There is the critical difference that Clinton was attempting to use Executive Privilege to avoid having to provide Congress with any documents or records, while Bush is freely offering those documents to Congress, but does not want them to be made "public".

The former allows for coverups. The latter does not. The real question is: "Why is there a requirement to release these publically?". The answer is really simple. The day to day workings and decision making processes in any organization, if released en-mass to the public would inevitably result in ammunition to use against that organization. It does not matter what that organization is. Someone will suggest something and whether acted upon or not, the mere fact of the suggestion may result in public outcry.

We've seen this before when minutes from meetings end up leaked to the public (both from private and public sources). It's pretty obvious that this is the reason the Dems want this information released publically. They don't care about these attorneys, or why they were fired. They just want to see if they can find some juicy statements made in an email or three that can be presented to the public with a "See what the Evil Bush administration guys are thinking/saying?" tag attached.


There's a very good reason why this is a bad idea. Organizations within the government (including the White House), need to have the freedom to consider many different options. They are hindered if every single member of their staff feels that anything they say may become public record and be gone over for any interpretation that might reflect badly on the people they work for. They need to feel safe that they can make any suggestion and allow it to be considered on the merit of the situation at hand, not based on how it might be percieved by some future public.


There is absolutely zero reason why Congress can't conduct their investigation into whether there was wrongdoing in the case of these firings *without* requiring that every single email and document be made public information. This should be something handled internally by the Judiciary Committee. If they can find evidence of wrongdoing, *then* they can bring it up, file charges, demand subpoenas for testimoney, etc. But right now all we have is a giant fishing expedition...


EDIT: I'm pretty sure "firingings" isn't a word...

Edited, Mar 22nd 2007 5:36pm by gbaji

While I'm sure you are, I think that most of the voters that went Dem in 2006 were hoping for something a bit more meaningful then "We'll use the power you give us to try to dig up irrelevant dirt on Republicans so we can con you all into giving us more power in the next election!!!".


Wasn't there something about the "first 100 hours" and how they were going to accomplish all these great things that the people voted Dem for? Oh yeah! They pretty much failed on every single point. But don't worry. They'll come up with enough scandal "smokescreen" to make sure that the voting public doesn't really notice that they didn't fullfill a single one of their promises, but instead embarked on a pork-finding-expedition to enrichen themselves at voter expense...

Joph. The bills that were passed were shadows of what Pelosi promised. Which is the point. With the exception of the minimum wage change, they're all things that look great if you don't read anything more then the title of the bill.

We're also looking at a list that somehow doesn't include the single most important issue that decided the vote in 2006, the Iraq war. Odd, don't you think...?

Getting back to AGAG, today's paper says

Edited, Mar 24th 2007 8:12am by Jophiel