Stand with Don Siegelman

A critical victim of a banana-republic political persecution fights on—Donald Siegelman, former governor of Alabama (1999 to 2003).

We need to stand with Donald Siegelman, a victim of Karl Rove and the Bush Department of Justice.

Siegelman was convicted in 2007 on a charge of being a successful Democrat in Alabama, though the official charges are bribery and mail fraud. It's utter bull shit.

As Lou Debose writes:

The 2002 Alabama gubernatorial election included the plot elements of a bad Southern Gothic: a Klan rally in the backwoods; a political operative stealing the opposition's signs and planting them at the rally; a lawyer stalking and photographing the operative; incriminating photos used to extort a political candidate; and a cabal of lawyers maneuvering a man into the courtroom of a judge who promised to ‘hang’ the defendant. There was even a prosecutor ‘messing up’ the case to see that the defendant made it to the gallows.

Make no mistake, this was a Bush-league, third-world prosecution.

Asks Brad Friedman, “How it's even possible that former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman's bribery case and conviction has not long ago been dropped by the Dept. of Justice is beyond us?”
Good question. Friedman has a new piece up: New Evidence Reveals Feds 'Coached, Cajoled, Threatened' Star Witness in Siegelman Case.

To keep up with latest developments and what you can do to take action, please visit Donald Siegelman's site and stand with justice.

Writes Friedman:

In 2008, 52 former state attorneys-general, both Republican and Democratic, asked Congress to investigate the dubious prosecution of Siegelman. Last month, Karl Rove testified to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee behind closed doors, about this case, and others related to the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal. The information from that lengthy interview has not yet been released.

The government is required to file their brief in reply to Siegelman's new motion next week. He is currently free on probation, pending his ongoing appeal and now, potentially, new trial.

Bush Cover Up

From Talking Points Memo: The Big Stone Wall: Nine Bush-Era Officials Refused To Cooperate With DOJ Probes, by Murray Waas:

At least nine Bush administration officials refused to cooperate with various Justice Department investigations during the final days of the Bush presidency, according to public records and interviews with federal law enforcement officials and many of the officials and their attorneys. In addition, two U.S. senators, a congresswoman, and the chief of staff to one of them, also refused to cooperate with the same investigations. In large part because of that noncooperation, Justice Department officials sought criminal prosecutors in at least two cases so far to take over their investigations so that they can compel the testimony of many of those officials to testify through the use of a federal grand jury.

Andrew Card Is Nuts

Update: Bush Jacketless In Oval Office: Photo Uncovered After Bush Chief Of Staff Slams Obama's Informal Appearance (SLIDESHOW) (Huffington Post)

So former Bush chief-of-staff Andrew Card thinks the new administration disrespects the oval office?

I almost fell out of my chair laughing. Card is one of the guys who went to the hospital with Gonzales to bully a very ill Attorney General Ashcroft to sign off on something illegal (which even Ashcroft wouldn't do). [James B. Comey blew the whistle.]

They lie, cheat, cause thousands of people to be killed, spy on Americans.

Bush makes a joke of missing WMDs under desk, where could they be, in a total break from empathy from our country's common good, and now Card says Obama should wear a suit coat in the oval office?

I never realized Card was this sick. I thought he may have been one of the middle-bad ones; I was wrong!

Juan Cole Hits GOP Hypocrisy

It's not hyperbole to suggest that any political move that today's GOP makes is likely a lie or a rank exercise in hypocrisy. That's what we face today.

From Juan Cole:

You know how the Republicans in the Senate refused to spend $30 billion to bring the US auto industry back from the brink?

It turns out that they were perfectly happy to waste $50 billion in taxpayer money on reconstruction boondoggles in Iraq on explicitly partisan grounds. A veteran Republican lobbyist, says the NYT, explicitly appealed to the then head of the Office of Management and Budget:

To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President . . . His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.

The Republicans, Which Way Forward

[Writer’s Preface: We’re going to win but we assume nothing beyond the rapacious, corrupt nature of GOP political operatives exemplified by Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen determined to thwart the will of the American people. Van Hollen lost, by the way. GOTV baby, GOTV.]

"The Republicans: Half religious zealots wanting to control every breath every citizen takes. And half ego-anarchist, libertarian cowboys shrilling for no government."
- Tony Kushner, Angels in America (2004)

After next Tuesday's historical defeat, the GOP will do a lot of soul-searching and conclude the GOP needs to drill for more oil, make more enemies abroad, and for God's sake do away with once and for all a woman's right to choose. Deep thinkers, the GOP.

No matter the post-election machinations of the amoral political operatives, I saw Republican future and its name is: Sarah Palin.

We could have not pleaded for a better figurehead.

Happy Monday

- Poll: Obama Widens Lead in Va. (Post) - We win Virginia, we win.

- End of Battle Centers on Turf Bush Carried (NYT) - Enough said.

Bush Seeks Forced Provisional Voting in Ohio

Incredible! Bush wants the US DOJ to look into the Ohio voting controversy, seeking forced provisional voting that suppresses legal voters.

After being shot down by the US Supreme Court on using the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) for the purpose of declaring eligible voters to be tentatively ineligible because of database mismatches - a purpose that the text of HAVA expressively forbids - Bush and the Republicans will not give up.

As the Milwaukee Branch of NAACP and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association write in their amicus brief in the Van Hollen v. GAB Wisconsin case, provisional voting is inherently suppressive, and many provisional voters will not be able to come back the next day to further corroborate their legal voting status, and will leave the polling place not knowing if their votes count.

A provisional ballot is a second-class vote. The voter leaves the polling place not knowing whether his or her vote will count. He or she will only find out by calling a toll-free number or checking a website. If the answer is that the vote was not counted, the voter will be given a reason, but by then it will be too late to correct. That voter will have been directly and absolutely deprived of the right to vote without a meaningful remedy. (Link to brief filed by Milwaukee Branch of NAACP and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association in Van Hollen v. GAB.)

This will not be a problem in Wisconsin, but the GOP is not giving up on stealing Ohio, again.

From RollCall:
President Bush is asking the Justice Department to look into whether 200,000 Buckeye State poll-goers must use provisional ballots on Election Day because their names do not match state databases.

White House spokesman Carlton Carroll confirmed Friday that the president will forward a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), requesting that the Justice Department look into whether the state’s voter rolls comply with the Help America Vote Act.
In a letter dated on Friday, the House GOP leader wrote that with Election Day 'less than two weeks away, immediate action by the Department is not only warranted, but also crucial.'

Folks, we have a major political party, the Republicans, who will do almost anything to stay in power. It's time for mass civil disobedience, something, to disrupt this outlaw element in the American political body. This is not a Party that is deserving of any respect whatsoever in our democracy.

VA Joke

Joke making the rounds among veterans' advocates sick of the Bush administration's incompetence and outright hostility towards veterans.

Ray & Bubba

Mechanical engineers were standing at the base of a flagpole, looking up. A woman walked by and asked what they were doing.

"'We're supposed to find the height of the flagpole," said Bubba, "but we don't have a tall enough ladder."

The woman took a wrench from her purse, loosened a few bolts, and laid the pole down. Then she took a tape measure from her pocket, took a measurement, and announced: "Eighteen-feet, six-inches," and walked away.

Ray shook his head and laughed. "Ain't that just like a woman!"

"We ask for the height and she gives us the length!"

Bubba and Ray are currently working for the VA in benefits adjudication.

Salon: Surveillance State Huge, Investigation May Be Finally Coming

Those longing for an accounting of Bush's historic abuse of power may get their wish.

In Salon, Tim Shorrock has uncovered new modes of state surveillance of Americans, and documents contemplating "a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate."

Breaking new ground on the government's programs monitoring Americans to be used in a declared national emergency, Shorrock reports on programs "designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law."

Some excerpts:

The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s. ...

A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.
According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.

The Looting of America

With zero focus on the public good, the Bush band of lying, corrupt Mayberry Machiavellians have left this country with a mess of historic proportions.

See some of the highlights, from the Democratic Caucus.

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Inspectors General Offices Under Bush Corrupted

The regional Inspectors General offices in the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) have become a collective political hatchet, rejecting their role as watchdogs ensuring good government and delivery of government services, in favor of an agency ranging from hostile to incompetent.

Unfortunately for the country this abandonment of impartial oversight by inspectors general extends throughout the government.

Joshua Kurlantzick reports in The New Republic's Look Who's Not Looking:

... Alas, Krongrad and Bowen's cases are hardly unique. In Washington, inspectors general in each cabinet agency are supposed to serve a vital role, operating as the watchdogs inside the federal government who sniff out fraud, misconduct, self-dealing, waste, and a host of other criminal activities. But under the Bush administration--surprise, surprise--inspector general positions have been filled by White House loyalists or outright hacks, leaving agencies virtually unpoliced. And while the inspectors general do nothing, the administration says nothing. No one is watching the watchers.

During previous administrations, the White House appointed impartial inspectors general, many of whom had extensive backgrounds in the areas they would police. As a 2004 report by the Democrats on the House Committee on Government Reform revealed, in the Clinton administration, over 60 percent of Inspectors General had some past experience conducting audits--the essential task of an IG--and less than one-quarter of Clinton IG appointees had previous political experience, meaning they were not hardcore Clinton loyalists. Under Bush, the committee found that more than 60 percent of Bush IG appointees had previous political experience, like working for a Republican White House, and more than half of them had been contributors to President Bush or other GOP candidates. Less than 20 percent of the Bush Inspectors General had any previous auditing experience.

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Today the Presidency Was Stolen from the American People: The Supreme Court Coup

Bush and his cronies could never win a free and open election in a democracy, so they stole the election in 2000 (and 2004).

Today marks the anniversary of that betrayal of the American people.

Via BuzzFlash:

"About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of Bush by a 5–4 vote, effectively ending the legal review of the vote count with Bush in the lead. Seven of the nine justices cited differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount, both of which, they ruled, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution."

Can anyone imagine the Supreme Court in 2000 using the Equal Protection Clause to install a Democrat in the White House had Al Gore offered up the argument?

From: Judith E. Schaeffer, Legal Director, People For the American Way

Re: Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court and the 2008 Election Season

Seven years ago, the United States Supreme Court issued its 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore. By stopping the contested vote count in Florida on December 12, 2000, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court effectively gave the presidency to George W. Bush and took the decision away from the voters.

Less than one year from now, the voters will decide the future of the Supreme Court. The next appointments to the Court will almost certainly be made by the President elected in November 2008, and confirmed by a Senate with new members elected in the same cycle. It’s crucial that voters understand that their votes will help determine the shape of the Court for many years to come, and the anniversary of Bush v. Gore is a timely opportunity to raise the issue for your readers.

Bush v. Gore demonstrated all too clearly that the Supreme Court has a profound and lasting effect on the daily lives of all Americans, who look to the Supreme Court as a fair arbiter of the law and our nation’s highest values.

Since that decision, President Bush’s lifetime appointments of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito have pushed the Court even farther to the right. The two men are likely to serve for many decades, ensuring that President Bush’s influence will extend long past the end of his term. Their nominations and confirmations to the Court illustrate the grave importance election results have on shaping the Court.

On issues ranging from reproductive choice to school integration to fair pay for equal work, the Roberts Court has started to reverse years of progress that most Americans accept as moderate, fair and wise. In the coming years, we can expect more and more rulings outside the mainstream.

It’s no coincidence that the Supreme Court has been a major electoral issue for the Religious Right for the last several election cycles. In order to roll back constitutional protections on privacy rights and church-state separation, the leaders of the movement have been whipping their followers into a fury for years, demanding that candidates pledge to appoint and confirm ultraconservative justices. The result has been a decades-long push by the far right to fill the federal courts with jurists who place a narrow ideological agenda above the rule of law and the Constitution.

The Republican candidates for President have been only too happy to oblige. John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee have all pledged to appoint justices in the mold of ultraconservative justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas – even when such an appointment would conflict with their own stated positions, such as Guiliani’s professed "pro-choice" stand.

Replacing another moderate justice with a hard-right conservative would be a devastating blow to the principles of fairness and equality that the vast majority of Americans embrace. Another right wing justice added to the ultra-conservative voting bloc of Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas could help reverse decades of precedents, threatening legal rights that Americans take for granted.

It’s time for progressives and moderates to make the same stand at the ballot box, and demand a Supreme Court that reflects mainstream American values: Equality, regardless of race or religion. Fair pay for women and minorities in the workplace. The rights of families to make private medical decisions without government interference. And much, much more.

Mainstream Americans must demand appointments of justices to the court who reflect their values, justices who will apply the law fairly, not ideologically. That will require a fair-minded president, and a Senate majority large enough to confirm progressive nominees.

People For the American Way will be working from now until Election Day to educate voters in key states about the importance of the courts, and how their votes for Senate and President could affect the Court and the nation for decades to come. To kick off our campaign, we’ll be placing a billboard in Manchester, New Hampshire from December 10th until primary day to highlight the Bush v. Gore anniversary and draw attention to the importance of the courts.

The anniversary of Bush v. Gore is a reminder that courts matter, something that voters should bear in mind throughout the coming election season. The outcome of the next election day may depend on it.
From People for the American Way.
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Greg Palast and American Elections

Greg Palast has been perhaps the top investigative reporter blowing the lid off GOP efforts, past and present, to steal American elections, illegally.

His site, Greg Palast, is worth checking out regularly.

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DoJ Official Experienced Waterboarding, Told WH It Is Illegal, Was ‘Forced Out’

Via ThinkProgress:

Last night, ABC World News reported that in 2004 then-acting assistant attorney general Daniel Levin was so concerned about the administration’s use of waterboarding that he went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure himself.

Levin took over former Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith’s job when he resigned and immediately began reassessing the administration’s interrogation techniques.

Levin released a new memo in Dec. 2004 that replaced the 2002 Bybee memo. Levin’s memo declared that “Torture is abhorrent” but also cautioned in a footnote that his memo was not declaring the administration’s previous opinions illegal. “The White House, with Alberto Gonzales as the White House counsel, insisted that this footnote be included in the memo.”

ABC reported that after Levin personally experienced waterboarding, he told the White House that it could be considered torture:

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn’t die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use.

Levin was working on a second memo that would have imposed tighter controls on the use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. While working on that memo, ABC reported “Levin was forced out of the Justice Department when Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General.” Watch it:

ABC’s Jan Crawford Greenburg reported, “Sources said Levin was seen as too independent by the Bush administration — not someone who could be counted on to endorse White House policies.”
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White House Withholds Hundreds of Abramoff Documents

White House Withholds Hundreds of Abramoff Documents

Chairman Waxman asks White House Counsel Fred Fielding to turn over more than 600 pages of documents relating to the activities of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff that are being withheld because they involve internal White House deliberations.
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Scott Horton: DoJ Schemed Against John Edwards and Hilary Clinton

Via Harper's Political Prosecutions.

You may have caught Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib on HBO.

Prominently featured is Scott Horton, a human rights attorney, of Harper's magazine. Horton never got the memo that human rights no longer matter in America.

Horton has been all over the DoJ scandals the last year or so.

Today's post, Political Prosecutions, is killer:

In the last two weeks, two sources, one of them inside of the Justice Department, have told me that a scheme was hatched in the upper echelons of the Bush Administration shortly after it took office in 2001 or early in 2002.

The project identified John Edwards and Hilary Clinton as likely Democratic challengers to President Bush, and identified prominent trial lawyers around the United States as the likely financial vehicle for his rise. It directed that their campaign finance records be fly-specked, and that offenses not be treated as administrative matters but rather as serious criminal offenses.

The scheme contemplated among other things that raids be staged on the law offices involved, and that the records seized not be limited to campaign finance—there was an acute interest in all politically oriented documents, in order to seize valuable intelligence on strategic planning from the enemy camp.

This all sounds rather fantastic—even more insidious than the enemies list days of the Nixon era. It is precisely the sort of crude harassment that a primitive dictatorship would use against its enemies—like Alexander Lukashenko in today’s Belarus, for instance. But as the descriptions were passed to me, I instantly recognized the pattern described recently in a case which has made the headlines in Michigan involving a prominent lawyer there, and a second case in Los Angeles. According to one source, the number of these cases is at least five and they are scattered about the country. One case, described to me in some detail, closely matches the pattern in Michigan and Los Angeles and occurred in the south on the Gulf of Mexico.

Why, I wondered, would the attorneys involved not scream bloody murder about this? Then it struck me. The threat of criminal investigation and prosecution is devastating to their law practices. Of course, they would keep it completely secret. And that silence has made the entire scheme possible. I am told that these cases involved the attorneys general personally—both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales—that their go-ahead was needed to stage the raids. And that in each case, the greatest concern within the political pirates commanding the operation has been that the public would get wind of the bigger picture. It was essential to pull it off that each case be viewed as something standing all on its own, and that the fact that there was a politically motivated project be obscured.

The key factor here is that all the cases involve campaign finance violations which are of a rather mundane nature. And in each case the FEC violations have been hyped into something quite preposterous. The political angle, I am told, is simple: make trial attorney’s money radioactive. Dry up the source. Take out a key element of the Democrats’ campaign finance strategy.

This looks very suspiciously like a Rove strategy.

And this bring us back to the key unanswered questions about Rove’s involvement in the process of directing political prosecutions. His fingerprints are all over the prosecution of Governor Siegelman in Alabama, and further substantial evidence of that will shortly be public, linking him both to federal and state prosecutors and to the principal figures in the Alabama G.O.P. in connection with the scheme to “get Siegelman.” It strikes me as probably that the plot to take out the trial lawyers and to use the Justice Department as the vehicle was also hatched by Rove. All of this helps explain why the documents that the Judiciary Committee is seeking are so vital to get to the bottom of the cloud now hanging over the Justice Department. It is essential to find out what conspiracies were involved driving prosecutions, to correct what was done, discipline those involved, and exonerate the victims. This in fact is the essence of what justice demands. For five years Washington has had a Department of Political Persecutions where the Department of Justice used to stand. That needs to be cleaned up.

More at Harper's Political Prosecutions.
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Biskupic Says He’ll Testify Under Oath in Thompson Affair

Wisconsin US Atty Defies DoJ and Says He'll Testify Under Oath

Madison, Wisconsin - Even as the U.S. Justice Department arrogantly stonewalls requests by the House Committee on the Judiciary for documents pertaining to politically-charged prosecutions in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (the Georgia Thompson affair), Wisconsin’s U.S. Atty. Stephen Biskupic volunteered to offer transcribed testimony under oath before the Judiciary Committee.

From Dan Bice in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

"If they (the House Judiciary Committee) want to hear from me, I'm happy to do it."
Even if the testimony is transcribed and under oath?
"It really doesn't matter to me," said Biskupic.

Biskupic’s stated inclination puts him in conflict with his bosses' position at the DoJ which refused to provide documents requested by the House Committee, and which only offered the Committee Biskupic’s presence for an "untranscribed briefing," as quoted from the DoJ's Sept. 4 response letter written by Brian A. Benczkowski, the Justice Department’s principal Congressional liaison.

As it relates to the Karl Rove-engineered prosecution in Alabama where evidence directly implicates the partisan nature of the prosecution of former democratic Gov. Don Siegelman, the DoJ has small Alabama newspapers screaming arrogance and corruption.

And rightfully so. In an almost unbelievable haughty tone, the DoJ responded to the Committee's request for DoJ documents on the prosecutions by saying it will not hand over the sought-after documents because of the DoJ’s concern that this "would chill the candid internal deliberations that are essential to the discharge of our law enforcement responsibilities,” involving decisions on whom the DoJ should initiate prosecutions.

Biskupic’ readiness to testify on the Thompson prosecution, though of no assistance to the innocent Georgia Thompson now, is commendable, especially when considered against the attitude of the corrupt DoJ that may be the lowest disgrace yet of the Bush administration.
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Iran War Moves

If you wish to understand how Bush and Company got away with the atrocity of Iraq, observe how the administration's moves against Iran are portrayed on the cover of the London Independent versus your local newspaper, nevermind the network news channels.

We live in a depoliticized, dumbed-down, corporate media society spawning an American public that can believe still that Saddam caused 9/11 (one out of three), and accept its government's statements unquestioningly, with merely a muttered comment.

A vibrant democracy would be alive with indignant cries of: They're doing it again, let's stop them.

But the depoliticalization of the American public, along with its related susceptibility to emotion and image, is an aspect that Bush and Cheney and the whole despicable lot of them know so well.

As Bush took a projected long-term $5-trillion surplus and turned it into projected multi-trillion dollar debt within five years while slashing social service spending, the Cheneys and Roves made a political calculation that they could get away with it without economic dislocations and political costs to the people who matter.

"Reagan proved deficits don't matter," Cheney said, according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill (Suskind. The Price of Loyality, p. 291). And Bush proved an all-out looting of the U.S. Treasury doesn't matter.

So now as tax cuts for the super-wealthy, public money directed at the high-tech sectors as never before, and war without end is waged, the burden of war falls on a small number of Americans in the armed forces and their families, while profiteering and crony contractor capitalism's fraud remains protected by the Bush administration, as it continues to insist that war is necessary to protect America as a society.

But Cheney is right, you get away with quite a bit; it's up to each American to draw the line at how much squandering the treasury, lying, and killing and maiming our young does matter.

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Twenty Years of 100,000 Troops in Iraq in Long Shot Gamble

It's of little importance what administration frontman Gen. David Petraeus has to say next Monday about Iraq.
If he has something on his mind embarrassing to Bush, then he won't say it.

If he tells the truth about Iraq, he won't be around long, so the career-minded General certainly won't be telling the truth, the Bush truth anyway is being crafted by politicos at the White House.

One truth Petraeus won't acknowledge are the lies and lust for oil that have killed 100,000s.

Kevin Drum of The Political Animal points to Fred Kaplan's another substantial bit of truth that likely won't be told:

- The matter if 100,000 American troops in Iraq for 20 years -

BURIED LEDE ALERT....Fred Kaplan has a good piece in Slate today about the upcoming Petraeus report and what Congress needs to ask about it. But I was more taken by an astonishing statement at the end of the piece from Stephen Biddle, a member of Petraeus's advisory panel. Here's his comment about the current plan to restore stability to Iraq via a "bottom up" strategy of working with tribal leaders:

Biddle also said (again, expressing his personal view) that the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years — and that, even so, it would be a "long-shot gamble."

Here's Paul Krugman's take:

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Oh, and not to bury my own lede, but just wondering how many troops could get PTSD disability benefits with the money spent on the slimy- PR-induced-Bush-says-"We're kicking ass"- surprise visit to Iraq last weekend. What a man that Bush is.

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DoJ on Biskupic Prosecution: 'How in the heck did this case get brought?'

As the politicalization of the DoJ and the numerous other Bush administration agencies has become clear in the public mind, the House Committee on the Judiciary Chair, John Conyers, released a Justice Department internal e-mail on the discredited Georgia Thompson prosecution, tossed out of a Seventh Circuit's appellate panel.

The e-mail as recounted in Talking Points Memo reads:

In the exchange, Craig Donsanto, the Election Crimes Branch Director and a well-respected veteran of the Department, responds to an email from Raymond Hulser, Deputy Chief of the Department's Public Integrity Section, who forwarded to Donsanto the appeals court's opinion overturning Thompson's conviction.

Donsanto asked in the e-mail: "Bad facts make bad law. How in the heck did this case get brought?"

U.S. Atty Stephen Biskupic has denied that political considerations ever entered his deliberations on whom his office decided to prosecute, though several high-profile cases were consonant with Republican political priorities, and Biskupic was on the endangered list of US Attys for failing to be a loyal Bushie before the string of highly questionable prosecutions.

Biskupic-prosecuted cases widely perceived as assisting Republican political priorities include: Alleged voter fraud, the exonerated Georgia Thompson case, and the unprecedented prosecution (in the middle of a VA claim) against a Wisconsin Navy veteran who exasperated the politicized VA, now facing a class action law suit.

The examination of Biskupic is part of the House Committee's efforts scrutinizing other prosecutions by several US Attys that directly targeted Democrats.

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