Fitzgerald Investigation of Leak of Identity of CIA Agent

Let me break this down for you,so you understand more about what I am talking about.

My additions to my comments are in red

TEll me,how many of those lies did you defend or agree with?
And should the people you dont agree with be prosecuted for their lies?

BTW,NONE of these things are acceptable to me,and I havent defended any of them.
Can you say the same?

You may not have defended them mm, but you seem to have made some accusations without facts to back them up.

1. Clinton lied about sex. (Most people do lie about sex. It's one of those things that seems to beg to be lied about. Just ask someone if they are good in bed.)
2. What lie was told by Clinton about billing records? I don't know of one. There might be a question as to what constitutes a significant amount of work but that is subjective.
3. Lied, pled guilty as I recall.
4. I don't recall Nixon lying about the recordiings. He fought to keep them from being turned over but could you tell us the specific lie?
5. What lies did Clinton tell about travel office employees? You seem to confuse WH flunkies with Clinton on this one.
6. Libby lied to Federal investigators and has been convicted of the crime.
7. What lie did Hillary tell about making money on futures? As I recall she said she did make money. You just don't want to believe what she said but I'll bet $100 you have no real evidence to call it a lie.

There's a big lie that MM and other apologists often spread about with glee; that conservatives/Republicans are the ones who support the troops.

parados and JTT, Get a load of this. The Bush apologists are all hypocrites of the worst kind. They'll find excuses for this one too!

Bush budget cuts veterans health care in 2009
Story Highlights• Bush budget assumes cuts in veterans' health care in 2009, 2010
• VA medical care costs have risen yearly for 20 years
• Number of veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan expected to increase 26 percent

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration's budget assumes cuts to veterans' health care two years from now -- even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.

Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012. But even administration allies say the numbers are not real and are being used to make the overall budget picture look better.

After an increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly -- by more than 10 percent in many years -- White House budget documents assume consecutive cutbacks in 2009 and 2010 and a freeze thereafter.

The proposed cuts are unrealistic in light of recent VA budget trends -- its medical care budget has risen every year for two decades and 83 percent in the six years since Bush took office -- sowing suspicion that the White House is simply making them up to make its long-term deficit figures look better.

"Either the administration is willingly proposing massive cuts in VA health care," said Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas, chairman of the panel overseeing the VA's budget. "Or its promise of a balanced budget by 2012 is based on completely unrealistic assumptions."

A spokesman for Larry Craig, R-Idaho, the top Republican on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, called the White House moves another step in a longtime "budgeting game."

"No one who is knowledgeable about VA budgeting issues anticipates any cuts to VA funding. None. Zero. Zip," Craig spokesman Jeff Schrade said.

Edwards said that a more realistic estimate of veterans costs is $16 billion higher than the Bush estimate for 2012.

In fact, even the White House doesn't seem serious about the numbers. It says the long-term budget numbers don't represent actual administration policies. Similar cuts assumed in earlier budgets have been reversed.

The veterans cuts, said White House budget office spokesman Sean Kevelighan, "don't reflect any policy decisions. We'll revisit them when we do the (future) budgets."

The number of veterans coming into the VA health care system has been rising by about 5 percent a year as the number of people returning from Iraq with illnesses or injuries keep rising. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans represent almost 5 percent of the VA's patient caseload, and many are returning from battle with grievous injuries requiring costly care, such as traumatic brain injuries.

All told, the VA expects to treat about 5.8 million patients next year, including 263,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The VA has been known to get short-term budget estimates wrong as well. Two years ago, Congress had to pass an emergency $1.5 billion infusion for veterans health programs for 2005 and added $2.7 billion to Bush's request for 2006. The VA underestimated the number of veterans, including those from Iraq and Afghanistan, who were seeking care, as well as the cost of treatment and long-term care.

The budget for hospital and medical care for veterans is at $35.6 billion for the current year, and would rise to $39.6 billion in 2008 under Bush's budget. That's about 9 percent. But the budget faces a cut to $38.8 billion in 2009 and would hover around that level through 2012.

The cuts come even as the number of veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is expected to increase 26 percent next year.

In Bush's proposal to balance the budget by 2012, he's assuming that spending on domestic agency operating budgets will increase by about 1 percent each year.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/13/vets.budget.ap/index.html

Is anybody watching Plame testify?

This is an interesting spin.

Clinton committed perjury before a grand jury.

Libby committed perjury before a grand jury.

Explain to me how you see these as anything other then what they are.

Yes, I'll talk about it at length today, including some quote mining

Cycloptichorn

Not my spin, I was responding to the list provided by MM. If you don't like his list, talk to him.

But, just to be quick, from today's hearing -

Plame was covert.
She was working on Iraqi WMD issues at the time.
She has worked overseas within the last 5 years.
Her cover was blown and her spy network was blown.
It's possible that other spies were blown when Brewster Jennings went down.
She never spoke to Kristoff about it.

Cycloptichorn

I don't know about else but I was caught completely surprised Plame was going to testify today at a congressional hearing. Just the other day I was complaining that the democrats were all talk. At least on this I have been proven wrong. Yeah.

I wish I had a picture of the chart they showed at the hearing, which said exactly who had talked to who about Plame's status, based upon what we know.

It's amazing

Cycloptichorn

BOMBSHELL: White House Security Chief Reveals -- No Probe of Plame Leak There

By E&P Staff

Published: March 16, 2007 1:00 PM ET

NEW YORK Dr. James Knodell, director of the Office of Security at the White House, told a congresisonal committee today that he was aware of no internal investigation or report into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.

The White House had first opposed Knodell testifying but after a threat of a subpoena from the committee yesterday he was allowed to appear today.

Knodell has testified that those who had participated in the leaking of classified information were required to attest to this and he was aware that no one, including Karl Rove, had done that.

He said that he had started at the White House in August 2004, a year after the leak, but his records show no evidence of a probe or report there: "I have no knowledge of any investigation in my office," he said.

Rep. Waxman recalled that President Bush had promised a full internal probe. Knodell repeated that no probe took place, as far as he knew, and was not happening today.

Knodell said he had "no" conversations whatsoever with the president, vice president, Karl Rove or anyone about the leak.

Asked by chairman Rep. Henry Waxman if he knew this was an issue of concern, he said "yes." Asked if he learned this from the White House or the press, he said, "through the press."

Rep. Elijah Cummings said all of this was "shocking."

Waxman said that Knodell's office's lack of action was a "breach within a breach." Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton called this a "dereliction of duty."

Knodell, who is a career employee and not a Bush appointee, said he would go back and "review this with senior management."

Democrats challenged his assertion that no probe was necessary since a criminal investigation was underway. They said that the criminal probe was narrowly focused, started well after the leak, and that in any case, the White House was required to carry out its own probe and deny security clearances to anyone who had leaked classified information.

Rep. Waxman at one point said that he regretted not being able to put up a video of the president promising a full probe but added, "I guess we will leave that to The Daily Show."

This report wasn't even necessary. \We all know Bush is a liar. Can't expect the lying fox to search into his own hole; they'd all end up in prison.

Here is a fascinating Wash. Post piece on the bogus letter that largely led us into a war.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/02/AR2007040201777.html?referrer=email

Here's an interesting piece about Cheney and women.

Mideast Diplomacy, Backwards and in High Heels
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 04/10/2007 - 10:20am. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Michael Winship


Throughout the whole Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame scandal and the ensuing trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, one particular thing kept bugging me.


The phony story about the African nation Niger selling yellowcake uranium to Saddam Hussein was bad enough. Then came Libby's outing of CIA operative Plame to discredit her husband Joe Wilson's trip to Niger and blowing the whistle on the yellowcake scam. Yeah, that was pretty heinous, too.

But what really charred my toast was the underlying, misogynistic assumption on the part of Cheney, Libby, and the rest of the executive pump head gang that Joe Wilson must be some kind of girly-man because Plame got him the assignment. Or as Cheney notoriously scrawled across a copy of Wilson's New York Times op-ed expose, "Did his wife send him on a junket?"

First, if you consider travel to Niger, a landlocked desert of drought, famine, and disease, "a junket," remind me not to let you book my next Carnival Cruise.

Second, we know from the testimony of Plame and others, she didn't hire Wilson for the mission but merely acted on the request of a supervisor. "I didn't suggest him," she told Congress. "There was no nepotism involved. I didn't have the authority." Besides, she said she wasn't exactly thrilled with the notion of him traveling while she was left wrangling their two-year-old twins, a task I imagine roughly equivalent to defusing land mines wrapped in diapers while juggling flaming Indian clubs.

But would it have been such a big deal if she had recommended him for the job? To suggest so is to endorse dilapidated notions of gender and inequality. Wilson was knowledgeable and qualified. Just about every professional couple I know here in New York job references one another from time to time -- if they're in the same line of work. In the media business, it's not unusual at all. And just look at all the power couples in DC, the dating and marital nexus of government, politics, and the press. So why the sniggering?

In the case of Cheney, a curious double standard seems to be at play. I'm not about to attempt climbing that particular mountain of pathology without an alpenstock, brandy, and several tanks of oxygen, but still. Here's a fellow with powerful women in his life: his wife Lynne, a former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, his daughter Elizabeth, a former deputy assistant secretary of state. His other daughter, Mary, was a high-ranking aide to her father during the 2004 re-election campaign. You might cringe at their politics but these are not women of small accomplishment (although doubtless helped along their career paths by the incumbent veep).

Yet look at the way Vice President Cheney reacted to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- a trip that came amongst similar stories to Damascus by various Republican congressmen -- visits that went unassailed by Cheney and the White House.

After Pelosi said she had spoken to Assad about the possibility of peace talks between Syria and Israel, Cheney chided her for "bad behavior" and scoffed that what she said was "a non-statement, nonsensical statement and didn't make any sense at all that she would suggest that those talks could go forward as long as the Syrians conducted themselves as a prime sponsor of terror."

Of course, that's not what she said. She pretty much stuck to the American and Israeli official policy line. Where she swayed from the one true path was in talking with the Syrians at all, even though this was a key recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, among others.

Sure, much of Cheney's reaction was pure, partisan politics. And, as Salon.com columnist Joe Conason noted, "The problem is not what Pelosi did or said, but how she exposed the exhaustion of neoconservative policy... The war against Pelosi is a rear-guard assault by the White House against moderates and liberals in both political parties who understand that the failed Bush policies have jeopardized American interests and hurt the Mideast peace process."

But would the response have been as vitriolic and bespittled if the Speaker was a man, if the trip had been led by, say, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid? I wonder.

What's additionally irksome in this whole sorry episode is that reports seem to point to the possibility of the White House and Cheney enlisting the help of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the Pelosi smear.

As noted by Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo blog, the April 2 edition of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that Olmert's government was using Pelosi to pass on a message to Assad that Israel had no intention of attacking Syria and sought peace.

But shortly after Pelosi's meeting with Assad, Olmert's office issued a "clarification" that "although Israel is interested in peace with Syria, that country continues to be part of the axis of evil and a force that encourages terror in the entire Middle East. In order to conduct serious and genuine peace negotiations, Syria must cease its support of terror."

To other members of Pelosi's delegation, it was a clarification of something unnecessary to clarify. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) quoted California Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, saying, "The speaker conveyed precisely what the prime minister... asked." JTA added, "That included the traditional Israeli caveat about Syrian backing for terrorism." Lantos suggested there was pressure from the White House. Certainly it was Olmert's statement upon which Cheney leaped to trash Speaker Pelosi.

According to JTA correspondent Ron Kampeas, it's not the first time the vice president has undermined a woman engaged in diplomacy. "Last year," he wrote, "U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice's surprise and anger.

"Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney's office, telling him to ignore Rice."

As the old joke goes, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels. It's even harder when your supposed dance partner deliberately keeps his foot on the hem of your gown.

From the article you quote, Advocate:

I thought Valerie was a covert agent, which is defined as one with overseas assignment, not staying at home changing diapers?

My aunt takes several overseas business trips a year. They are assigned to her by her superiors. She has kids.

Lame

Cycloptichorn

Cyclo, If you visit other threads where okie posts, you´ll find that most of his opinions are lame.

That's a very bright observation by Consason.

Does your aunt have an overseas assignment or does she just make a trip now and then? If she is actually on overseas assignment, maybe she is "covert?"