Bush Supporters' Aftermath Thread IV

okie wrote:

To repeat, tearing down the Wall was progress, cyclops, but it wasn't done by so-called "progressives." Liberals love to call themselves that, but it has little to do with actual progress.

Yes, and Reagan didn't go and personally tear down anything. He voiced support for those who did - the Progressive people of Germany.

Are you claiming that Reagan tore down the wall himself? It seems you've bought into the hype about him just a little too much.

I'd back blueflames opinion 24/7 over Ticomaya's.

People are again trying to confuse another country's "liberalism" with those of the US. What georgeob wrote was no such thing as a "back up" for your position, okie.

BTW, look all the "bold new things" Bush talked about during the past six years; most backfired and/or never improved what he said he would do.
Conservatism at its finest!

New Charges Filed In Abramoff Investigation
2007-06-06

The head of a Republican environmental advocacy group is set to plead guilty in the Jack Abramoff scandal and is cooperating with an FBI investigation into corruption involving Congress and the Bush administration, two people close to the case said Wednesday.

Italia Federici served as a go-between for Abramoff, the once-powerful lobbyist, and J. Steven Griles, the deputy interior secretary during President Bush's first term, prosecutors said Wednesday in documents charging her with tax evasion and obstructing a Senate inquiry into the Abramoff scandal.

Under a deal with the Justice Department, she must cooperate with authorities and is identifying other criminal targets, said one of the people.

Authorities believe Federici may be able to provide information about former Interior Secretary Gale Norton, other Bush administration officials and the contacts that she, Abramoff and Griles cultivated in Congress, said the second individual.

Both spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing and the plea deal will not be official until a court hearing scheduled for Friday.

Federici introduced Abramoff to Griles, an introduction that Griles said gave the lobbyist more credibility and allowed him greater access to the department. After making his entree, Abramoff repeatedly sought Griles' intervention at the Interior Department on behalf of Indian tribal clients.

Federici "regrets her past trust and confidence in Jack Abramoff, a then-highly regarded Washington lobbyist who professed a shared interest in Ms. Federici's environmental advocacy," Federici's attorneys said in a statement.

Federici is accused of lying about this relationship in testimony before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which in 2005 was investigating Abramoff's dealings with the Interior Department.

Federici's attorneys said she accepted responsibility for her mistakes.

"Such conduct is not only inconsistent with her own ideals and expectations, but also contradicts her years of public service in the not-for-profit community," said attorneys Jonathan Rosen and Noam Fischman.

Federici co-founded the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy - also known as CREA - with Norton and Grover Norquist, a college friend of Abramoff and a close ally of President Bush. Norquist helped set up contacts with the Bush administration for Abramoff's clients, while Abramoff pushed his clients to donate to Norquist's tax reform group, e-mails in the case have shown.

Prosecutors say Federici supplemented her salary at the nonprofit by making ATM withdrawals directly from the organization's bank accounts. She did not pay income tax from 2001-2003 and owes tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes, said prosecutors.

In March, Griles became the highest-ranking Bush administration official convicted in the lobbying scandal when he pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstructing justice by lying to the Indian Affairs Committee in 2005.

During that period, Abramoff was directing his tribal clients to give $500,000 to CREA. Abramoff is serving time in federal prison for a fraudulent Florida casino deal and is awaiting sentencing in the Washington public corruption case.

He is the government's star witness in a case that has already landed former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, in prison, and has ensnared members of the Bush administration and several congressional aides.

Wash. Post's Birnbaum: Jefferson indictment balances out multiple GOP convictions, indictments, investigations
2007-06-06

On the June 4 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, Washington Post staff writer Jeffrey Birnbaum asserted that the June 4 bribery indictment of Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) "makes the allegations of corruption bipartisan." In just the past three years, however, at least nine Republican members of Congress and Bush administration officials -- including the former House majority leader, Tom DeLay (TX) -- have been indicted or pleaded guilty to criminal charges. Birnbaum did not explain how one indicted Democratic congressman who was not in the congressional leadership (and another who is under investigation) is equivalent to the wide swath of Republicans who have been convicted, indicted, or are under investigation.
Birnbaum was responding to a question from Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume about whether Jefferson's indictment "hurts the Democrats as a group in Congress." Hume had previously asked Roll Call editor Morton M. Kondracke whether the indictment "change[s] ... the political equation" on the issue of corruption and whether it "deprive[s] the Democrats of [the] issue" and "help[s] the Republicans in their efforts to try to say, 'Look, you know, they're no different than we were?' " Kondracke, however, said he did not think that was the case.

But while Birnbaum mentioned former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA), who pleaded guilty to taking bribes from defense contractor Mitchell Wade, Birnbaum did not mention the other Republican members of Congress and Bush administration officials who have either pleaded guilty, been convicted, or been indicted:

Former Rep. Bob Ney (OH) pleaded guilty in October 2006 to taking bribes from former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

DeLay was indicted in October 2005 for money laundering and conspiracy to launder money. A former DeLay aide, Tony Rudy, pleaded guilty in connection with the Abramoff scandal, while another former aide, Michael Scanlon, pleaded guilty to conspiring with Abramoff to bribe public officials.
Former White House procurement official David H. Safavian was convicted in June 2006 of lying and obstructing justice in the Abramoff investigation, as Media Matters for America has noted.

Former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted in March 2006 of obstructing justice and making false statements. On June 5, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay a $250,000 fine.

Former Deputy Secretary of the Interior J. Steven Griles pleaded guilty in March 2007 to obstructing justice. As a March 23 Associated Press article reported, Griles "admitt[ed] in a plea agreement that he lied in testimony before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on Nov. 2, 2005, and during an earlier deposition with the panel's investigators on October 20, 2005."

Former CIA executive director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo was charged by federal prosecutors in San Diego with improperly trying to steer a $132 million contract to defense contractor Brent Wilkes.

Former FDA commissioner Lester Crawford pleaded guilty to charges of "conflict of interest and false reporting of information about stocks he owned in food, beverage and medical device companies he was in charge of regulating," according to an October 17, 2006, Associated Press report. "Beginning in 2002," the AP report stated, "Crawford filed seven incorrect financial reports with a government ethics office and Congress, leading to the charges."

Former Federal Housing Finance Board chairman John T. Korsmo "pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the Finance Board, and the Inspector General for the Finance Board," as Media Matters noted.

In addition, several current and former Republican congressmen and senators are reportedly under investigation over corruption allegations. For example:

Rep. John T. Doolittle (CA) is reportedly under investigation by the FBI in connection to his dealings with Abramoff.

Rep. Jerry Lewis (CA) is reportedly under investigation in connection with the Cunningham scandal, and will reportedly not seek re-election.

According to a January 31 article in The Hill, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said in an interview that "he believes Lewis is innocent until proven guilty, and that prevented him from toppling him from the top GOP spot on the [House Appropriations Committee]."

Rep. Gary Miller (CA) is reportedly under investigation for two land deals and related taxes, although he says FBI agents have not contacted him.

Rep. Rick Renzi (AZ) is reportedly the subject of a preliminary investigation into whether he pressured several landowners to buy land from a business partner.

Former Sen. Conrad Burns (MT) is reportedly under investigation in the Abramoff investigation.

Former Rep. Curt Weldon (PA) is being investigated over allegations that he "used his influence to secure lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter," according to an October 14, 2006, Associated Press article.

In addition, as The Washington Post reported on March 8, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-NM) is the subject of a preliminary Senate ethics investigation into a phone call he made to then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias before the 2006 elections. According to an April 12 article in the Post, "ecause the House ethics committee keeps its probes secret, it is unclear whether the lower chamber is looking into the similar allegations concerning Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), a close ally of Domenici." Domenici and Wilson allegedly pressured Iglesias to indict a local Democratic official on corruption charges before the 2006 elections.

By contrast, one Democrat, Rep. Alan Mollohan (WV), is reportedly the subject of an FBI investigation.

From the June 4 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:

HUME: All right, so -- so it's a big case. Long awaited. Came too late, the Republicans had hoped, of course, it would come before the '06 election and would not allow that election to be so much, in their view, about Republican corruption, of which there had been a number of instances.

Does this change the equation -- the political equation on that subject? Does this deprive Democrats of this issue? Does this help the Republicans in their efforts to try to say, "Look, you know, they're no different than we were?" Or not?

KONDRACKE: I don't think so. Look, the Democrats -- when his office was raided, back in the last Congress -- up on Capitol Hill, the Democrats kicked him off the House Ways and Means Committee. They left him on one other committee. And the score --

HUME: But now they're proposing to put him on the Homeland Security Committee.

KONDRACKE: Well, I can't believe that that will ever actually happen. They've been -- Nancy Pelosi had been talking about that for a long time. You're not going to put somebody who's under indictment --

HUME: But she was under a certain amount of pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus to restore him to the Ways and Means Committee.

KONDRACKE: Yeah, but now that he's indicted -- now that he's indicted -- with this indictment, they are not going to do that.

HUME: So, you don't think this will tar the -- this hurts the Democrats as a group in Congress?

BIRNBAUM: I think it makes the allegations of corruption bipartisan, now, clearly. And so, it does help the Republicans and hurt the Democrats, essentially. And I think the Democrats are trying to make sure that they are hurt less than they're about to be by speaking about this. They are trying to -- Nancy Pelosi is trying to get Jefferson off of the Small Business Committee, which he's still on, or move him. But, I think Boehner -- Congressman John Boehner, the majority [sic] leader in the House, is trying to press the political issue by pushing the idea of expelling Jefferson if he is actually found guilty and keeping it in the forefront, in large part for political purposes in the same way that the Democrats did that to the Republicans with Duke Cunningham.

FRED BARNES (Weekly Standard executive editor): It is not going to impress the voters. Nancy Pelosi wants to take this guy with this horrendous indictment off of the Small Business Committee. I mean, that's not going to help much. Look, this is gonna -- this hurts Democrats.

Look, I don't think congressional corruption was going to be a huge issue in the 2008 election, in 2006 it won it. It was -- it killed Republicans, but this will, I think, make Democrats a lot less likely to try to use that issue again.

Analysis
For U.S. and Key Allies in Region, Mideast Morass Just Gets Deeper

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 17, 2007; Page A16

The Middle East is in flames. Over the past week, war erupted among the Palestinians and their government collapsed. A Shiite shrine in Iraq was bombed -- again -- as the new U.S. military strategy showed no sign of diminishing violence. Lebanon battled a new al-Qaeda faction in the north as a leading politician was assassinated in Beirut. And Egyptian elections were marred by irregularities, including police obstructing voters, in a serious setback to democracy efforts.

U.S. policy in the region isn't faring much better, say Middle East and U.S. analysts.

"It's close to a nightmare for the administration," Ellen Laipson, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center and former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an interview from Dubai. "They can't catch their breath. . . . It makes Condi Rice's last year as secretary of state very daunting. What are the odds she can get virtually anything back on track?"

Each flash point has its own dynamics, but a common denominator is that leaders in each country -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak -- are each pivotal U.S. allies.

"The people we rely on the most to help are under siege, just as we are," said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution fellow and former National Security Council staffer. "Three of the four leaders may either not make it [politically] through the end of the summer or find themselves irrelevant by then."

The broad danger is a breakdown of the traditional states and conflicts that have defined Middle East politics since the 1970s, said Paul Salem of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Beirut office. An increasing number of places -- Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories -- now have rival claimants to power, backed by their own militaries.

Also, once divided by the Arab-Israeli conflict, the region is now the battleground for three other rivalries: the United States and its allies pitted against an Iran-Syria alliance in a proxy war regionwide, secular governments confronted by rising al-Qaeda extremism, and autocratic governments reverting to draconian tactics to quash grass-roots movements vying for democratic change.

Extremists are scoring the most points. "Gaza is the latest evidence that most of the trends are pointed in the wrong direction. It's yet another gain for radical forces. It's another gain for Iran. It's another setback for the U.S., Israel and the Sunni regimes," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and State Department policy planning chief during President Bush's first term. "The United States has not shown that moderation pays or will accomplish more than violence."

A second danger is that conflicts now overlap. "You can't look at Lebanon or Iraq or the Palestinians or Syria or Iran and try to deal with them separately anymore. You could have 10 years ago. Now they are politically and structurally linked," said Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut.

Khouri said the United States deserves a good share of the blame for a confluence of disasters spawning pessimism and anger across the region.

On the Palestinian breakdown, he said, "It's hard to know who appears more ludicrous . . . the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas leaderships allowing their gunmen to fight it out on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, or an American administration saying it supports the 'moderates' in Palestine who want to negotiate peace with Israel."

U.S. officials counter that the Palestinians have demonstrated a sense of national identity and are not likely to want to split the West Bank and Gaza. Because the West Bank is the center of the conflict with Israel, a peace process remains viable, they say.

In Iraq, the second attack on Samarra's mosque and the failure of the Baghdad security plan to lessen the death toll shows that U.S. influence and power is slipping away, Laipson said.

"The best that we can hope for is that, come autumn, the administration will be able to persuade Congress to support a much-reduced U.S. presence and avoid simply pulling out," Haass added. "If we can do that, it will at least give the Iraqis more time to try to discover a national political identity and reduce the chance that Iraq will be seen simply as an American foreign policy disaster."

In Lebanon, a beleaguered government faces a triple threat. The Army entered the fifth week of fighting a few hundred Fatah al-Islam extremists, who held out in a Palestinian refugee camp despite a U.S. infusion of arms and ammunition. The car-bomb killing of anti-Syria parliamentarian Walid Eido has deepened fears that Syria is seeking to reassert control after its 2005 withdrawal. Hezbollah is still blockading Siniora's government -- both politically and physically.

"What's consistent about all three is wanting to get rid of the Siniora government. It's not coordinated, but it will stretch the government to its limits," Riedel said.

U.S. officials counter that Siniora has proven surprisingly resilient, despite Syrian attempts to restore its control. In Egypt, the detention of hundreds of activists, including candidates for parliament's upper house, reflects the deteriorating state of democracy efforts. "Arab regimes are regrouping now that the U.S. push for democracy seems to have come to an end," said the Carnegie Endowment's Salem.

But even former Bush administration officials blame Washington for the region's latest woes. "The U.S. bears responsibility, both for things it's done, particularly in Iraq, but also for things it's not done, which is where the peace process comes in," Haass said. "The president never developed his idea of a Palestinian state. He never used his leverage to help Egypt get launched on a trajectory of greater openness."

The United States finds itself active in more Middle East theaters than ever but with less ability to influence events, said Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group. "It is very much now manipulated in places that it once thought it could manipulate."

Bush promises to veto homeland security bill.Yesterday, the House passed a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, despite President Bush's veto threat. The White House objects to a provision that would require DHS contractors to "pay their employees at least the local prevailing wage." It also "funds the hiring of 3,000 new border patrol agents, rejects the cuts President Bush sought in the training and equipping of first responders, and improves aviation and port security."

There should be enough material there to last you quite a while.

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a 43 year old US Navy veteran living in North Las Vegas, Nevada. He first started blogging in November 2003 as one of the first writers of Blogs For Bush, and is also a contributor to GOP Bloggers.

42, a senior writer for Blogs for Bush. "Born absurdly in New York State, he grew up in California, served four years in the United States Navy and has lived in Las Vegas, Nevada for the past eleven years. He is a student of history with ambitions of writing both historical works and fiction novels.

Mark Noonan is a 42-year-old man who lives in North Las Vegas, Nevada. He is of rigidly Catholic theology, mighty disappointed to note he'll soon be 43, and to steal from Douglas Adams a bit he is almost, but not quite, exactly unlike anyone you've ever met. His favorite recreation is to write commentary about current affairs.