Send Karl Rove to jail

something i can certainly get behind... how about you...?

sign the petition here...

brave new films...



i can see it's time to trot out my personally doctored rove photo that i haven't used in a while...

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Don't forget that Karl, Satan's doppelganger, is STILL LURKING ABOUT out there [UPDATE]

and, one of these days, he's going to get what's coming to him...

Senators joined the House on Thursday in approving subpoenas to force President Bush's political adviser and other aides to testify about the firings of federal prosecutors.

While Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is not budging from his insistence that Rove be questioned publicly and under oath, Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter offered President Bush a compromise.

Specter, who took the first step toward brokering a deal a few hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved but did not issue subpoenas for Rove and others, suggested that select lawmakers question Karl Rove and other administration officials in public, but not under oath.

White House counsel Fred Fielding promised to convey the offer to Bush, but Leahy doesn't support the deal. "I've had a lot of those unstructured briefings and found that I was given, in many instances, not the whole truth, nothing near the whole truth," said Leahy.

His committee, by voice vote Thursday, gave Leahy authority to issue subpoenas for Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and her deputy, William Kelley. The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., was given that same authority a day earlier.

but, while rove is waiting for his day of reckoning, he's definitely going to make sure he's comfy...


Karl Rove's carriage house in Rosemary Beach, Florida.
Only the carriage house is visible from the street;
the house proper lies behind it.

Whatever the next chapter of Rove's life has in store, some of the action will probably take place in Rosemary Beach, Florida, where he bought land in 2002.

According to political journalist Jim Moore, many factors probably influenced the timing of Rove's resignation--including the desire to cash in on lucrative speaker's fees and the prospect of reinventing himself as a political pundit on the national stage.

"Ultimately, though, what probably appeals to Karl the most is being a sort of freelance Dr. Evil," Moore –- a Rove critic -- explained in an email to RAW STORY. "He can do his work now for hire under the guise of any organization that wants to hire him or he can do it for fun and generally avoid the restraint of party or candidate. Have darkness. Will travel."

Rosemary Beach, Florida bills itself as a vacation community, but Rove's home is no beach bungalow. His Dill Lane pad is a 2,578-square-foot cedar and white stucco structure with a stoop, 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, and an outdoor shower. Opposite the main house, separated by a small walled courtyard is a two-story carriage house with a two-car garage on the ground floor.

my fondest wish for years has been that satan will show up in person to collect his marker on rove's soul...

[UPDATE]

and HERE'S the very thing that may do dr. evil in...

In a telephone interview shortly after he walked out of a federal prison in Oakdale, La., Mr. Siegelman said there had been “abuse of power” in his case, and repeatedly cited the influence of Karl Rove, the former White House political director.

“His fingerprints are smeared all over the case,” Mr. Siegelman said, a day after a federal appeals court ordered him released on bond and said there were legitimate questions about his case.

i've said many times, i don't subscribe to schadenfreude... i take no pleasure in seeing anybody take a fall... i do, however, feel strongly about every individual ultimately having to face the consequences of his or her behavior... in rove's case, there are one HELL of a lot of consequences that he has managed to successfully avoid - so far... i want to be around when that changes...

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FCC employees to stage silent protest tomorrow against FCC Chairman Kevin Martin

ars technica's matthew lasar...

It appears that a critical mass of FCC grunts are sick of what they experience as a super-politicized work life in which just about anything that they want to do has to get the go-ahead from the top, that being Kevin Martin. "Nothing happens in the Commission without the approval of the Chairman's office," my source told me [Lasar]. "It is incredible. We have become so political."

Do you have any sense of the logic of these directives from the Chair? I asked. "Nope," came the reply. "It seems as random as he got up this morning and ate his breakfast and just decided to do it."

Why are FCC employees upset about this? Not because they disagree with Kevin Martin's perspective on this or that FCC issue, but because, according to my source, he and his top subordinates demand that staff skip proper procedures and leapfrog various rules, even Congressional mandated rules, on a day-to-day level.

"In the past I may or may not have agreed with the outcome, but at least the proper procedures were followed. Now they tell us 'what are the media reform groups going to do: file a class action lawsuit? Just do it.' But ethically I have to sleep at night. It's not the decision, it's how the decision is reached. The situation has become arbitrary and capricious."

[...]

"I am not a disgruntled employee," I was told. "I love my job. But this situation has become unbearable. We will not play this game. I have to sleep at night."

why would anybody doubt this...? the fcc is just another executive branch agency made over to serve the most partisan, nay ideological, bush administration interests...

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John Bolton uses the Karl Rove tactic on the Iran NIE

you all know the karl rove tactic, i'm sure... that's where, on the biggest public platform you can find, using the biggest megaphone around, you point-blank accuse someone else of doing precisely what you routinely do yourself... it's jaw-droppingly effective because it's the essence of the "BIG LIE..." when you hear it, you can only shake your head and marvel at the incredible chutzpah of someone who could lie like this... here's one of the principal "POLITICIZERS" of intelligence in the entire world, one of the neocon vampires who lied us into an illegal war in iraq, accusing people in the intelligence community of POLITICIZING intelligence... it's breathtaking...

I really think the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have to look at how this NIE was put together because there are a lot unexplained points in here. […]

I think there is a risk here, and I raise this as a question, whether people in the intelligence community who had their own agenda on Iran for some time now have politicized this intelligence and politicized these judgments in a way contrary to where the administration was going. I think somebody needs to look at that.

so, WTF does having "their own agenda" mean...? is that an agenda that calls for NOT wanting to go to war...? NOT bombing another country back into the stone age...? does "contrary to where the administration is going" mean "contrary to death and destruction"...?

please, dear lord, spare me from this kind of man and this kind of thinking...

(thanks to think progress...)

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Like changing the driver of the DOJ bus is going to make a difference

stuff that makes me crazy...

both from the la times...

Gonzales' legacy of controversy
Questions linger about limits on civil liberties and influence of politics on justice.

Josh Meyer and Tom Hamburger, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

[...]

The controversies lingering beyond Gonzales' scheduled departure next month fall into two broad categories: whether he went too far in abridging civil liberties in the name of safeguarding the nation against terrorist threats, and whether he and his subordinates allowed political considerations to intrude improperly on the administration of justice.

lingering...? LINGERING...?? they ain't friggin' LINGERING...! they're as present and real as the nose on your face, and, trust me, neither are they QUESTIONS nor are they solely a function of alberto gonzales... abridging civil liberties and politicizing the executive branch are HALLMARKS of the bush administration, from george on down... the former was a condition of employment for every political appointee at the doj, and the latter a condition of employment for every political appointee in the executive branch, and BOTH ARE STILL IN FORCE... changing the driver of the doj bus is virtually meaningless as long as that bus is still following the road map laid out by the white house to drive the country off a cliff and render the u.s. constitution meaningless...

as if that wasn't bad enough, we also have this...

For Bush, an opportunity in a loss
Gonzales' departure may give Bush a shot at reviving his presidency because his Texas inner circle is gone, analysts say.

By Maura Reynolds and James Gerstenzang, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

[...]

In two weeks, the president has accepted the resignations of the two members of his staff who have drawn the most ire from the Democrats who now control Congress: Gonzales and political advisor Karl Rove. And that may give Bush a chance to salvage his relationship with Capitol Hill and the legacy of his second term.

oferchrissakes... get a goddam clue, willya...? anybody who believes bush is going to change a goddam thing is smokin' some really strong shit... first of all, rove may be out of the white house, but you can bet your ass that he's on the phone to george several times a day... gonzales was nothing more than a place-holder, a foil to confer a degree of legitimacy to the evil machinations of george, karl and dick, someone sent over to mind the doj store while his next level of political appointees looted it... you have to look at who's left... do you think for a minute that dick cheney and david addington are sitting there, throwing up their hands and saying, "well, what's a body to do...?" hell, no... they're still steering george's bus and they will continue to do so, by god, until they're forcibly stopped... anybody who sees the exit of rove and gonzales as a reason to breathe a sigh of relief and break out the bubbly had better think again...

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Heritage provided the intellectual horsepower for the Bushies to politicize our government

while reading a jim hightower article reprinted in alternet, i was pointed to a 2001 heritage foundation report that contains these eye-opening points...

Career civil servants should not be tasked with formulating and executing the details of an agenda for major policy change. Political appointees, personally loyal to the President and fully committed to his policy agenda, are essential to his success...

[...]

The President needs a full cadre of personnel committed to him and his agenda in the federal agencies that execute the details of national policy.

• The new President must make liberal use of his power of appointment, get a loyal team in place to carry out his agenda, and insist on accountability while maintaining a clear distinction between career and non-career employees.

• Political appointments to key policymaking positions must be made in a timely fashion.

• Political appointees must be in charge of implementing the President's policies and readily available to speak for the Administration.

• Political appointees should make key management decisions; such decisions should not be delegated to the career bureaucracy.

robert moffit, the author of the report, calls this the "political administration model..." he continues with this caveat, the outcome of which has been evident from the earliest days of the bush administration, most recently on display in the justice department...

[T]he Office of Presidential Personnel (OPP) must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second, and that the whole governmental apparatus must be managed from this perspective. Picking appointees who are "best for the job" merely in terms of expert qualifications can be disastrous for an Administration genuinely committed to change, because the best qualified are already in the career positions and part of the status quo--the permanent government.

and so, political appointees, chosen above all else for their loyalty and frequently without any depth of expertise in the areas in which they are placed, end up overriding and overruling those who DO have the expertise in order to accomplish a political agenda... while this could conceivably be a good thing IF the ruling political administration was truly serving the common good of the nation, for a presidential administration with only two items on its agenda, power and money, it's an unmitigated disaster, not for those in power, of course, but for the country...

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Executive branch agencies merely Republican party branch offices

amazing... the media is starting to report on what we bloggers have known since bush came into office...

"Bit by bit, as odd scraps of information surface, the hidden history of George W. Bush's presidency is emerging, like a jigsaw puzzle coming together," [Cox News columnist Tom Teepen] writes.

[...]

According to Teepen, the "relentlessness and reach of Bush's drive to turn the traditionally professional departments of the government into a chain of party proprietaries are unexampled in modern times, and it is unlikely we have heard the last of these tales."

< sigh > it didn't take recent events to reveal this and it sure as hell wouldn't have taken much investigation to have put these "jigsaw puzzle" pieces together a long, long time ago... i suppose better late than never, but, goddam it, why did we have to wait until the damage done to our nation has rendered it almost unrecognizable...? huh...? why...?

(thanks to raw story...)

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