Good Post Alert - Larisa Alexandrovna's "Mississippi Justice: Bush US Attorney targeted my wife, supporters and friends"

Here's yet another glimpse of the Bush Grindhouse justice system

Larisa Alexandrovna, over on The Raw Story, has a great piece today, of some serious shenanigans that played out down in Mississippi

Mississippi Justice: Bush US Attorney targeted my wife, supporters and friends

Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz Jr. was indicted in 2003 on charges relating to his receipt of a loan guarantee from trial lawyer Paul Minor - a personal friend and the largest Democratic donor in Mississippi - to help defray campaign debts. A Bush-appointed US Attorney, Dunnica Lampton, brought charges of bribery against Diaz, Minor and two other Mississippi judges. Diaz was acquitted of all those charges... Within days of his acquittal, Diaz was indicted for a second time. He was again acquitted.

Normally, a criminal investigation begins after a crime is committed," Diaz told me. "Investigators are sent out to gather evidence and a list of suspects is drawn up. Sometimes an investigation is begun after a complaint is made about suspicious activity. In our case neither of these things occurred."

"In other words," he continued. "An individual was singled out for examination from the federal government and prosecutors then attempted to make his conduct fit into some criminal statute. This is not how our system of justice is supposed to operate."

More of Karl Rove's vision of an America under Republican Majority

Check it out, it's a great interview.


Bonus Links

Good Posts Alert - Larisa Alexandrovna's "The Permanent Republican Majority"

Larisa Alexandrovna: Alabama Democrats are Under Attack

This Is Huge! ... Siegalman Released On Appeal!

When Former Attorney Generals Soar

Then: $52 Million-Plus Payday for Christie's Old Boss

"Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft was one of five private attorneys whom Christie hand-picked to monitor the implant makers. Now Ashcroft's D.C.-based firm is poised to collect more than $52 million in 18 months, among the biggest payouts reported for a federal monitor.

Disclosed in SEC filings, the arrangement calls for Zimmer Holdings of Indiana to pay Ashcroft Group Consulting Services an average monthly fee between $1.5 million and $2.9 million. The figure includes a flat payment of $750,000 to the firm's "senior leadership group," individual legal and consulting services billed at up to $895 an hour, and as much as $250,000 a month for expenses including private airfare, lodging and meals."

Today: Ashcroft Claims 'No Conflict' in $50M No-Bid Contract

"There is not a conflict," Ashcroft said. "There is not an appearance of conflict."

And, he did it, we assume, with a straight face.

"Ashcroft said that outside monitors, which have been used increasingly in corporate fraud cases in recent years, save taxpayers money by avoiding costly prosecutions and forcing companies to follow the law.

"This hearing cost far more in tax dollars than my monitorship will cost, because it did not cost taxpayers one thin dime," Ashcroft testified. Under the arrangements, the cost of the monitoring is borne by the company, which agrees to pay to avoid criminal prosecution."

Boy, how does someone, not in the Bush Grindhouse, get a gig like this?


Bonus Ashcroft

BBC: Ashcroft rallies troops with song

YouTube - Let the Eagle Soar - Music and Lyrics by John Ashcroft

(And wait until you get to the refrain!)


Before the drapes ... And the wink-and-nod payout

The Friday Night Bag Job

Boy, he may not know what torture, or waterboarding is, but our new Crony General has it down, when it comes to Bag Jobs!

Mukasey won't enforce Contempt Citations

"Here is your Friday News Dump™. And boy howdy, is it the sort of thing a failed administration would really try to release after the east coast network news broadcasts ... "

It seems that the See-No-Evil-Hear-No-Evil-Speak-No-Evil Crony General Michael Mukasey will not enforce the Congressional Contempt Citations, against Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, for their roles in the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, because ... Drum roll, please ...

"... Mukasey says they committed no crime ..."

Holy Scales of Justice, Batman!

Wasn't it just nearly 35-years ago, in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre", when the United States Attorney General resigned, in protest against unitary power, and the Executive Branch usurping the Constitution?

But, then again, times change, and we may have this Crony General all wrong.

He might not know torture, but he, apparently, has a keen eye, and innate sixth sense for being able to determine what is, or isn't a crime

Get this man a Greyhound Hot Seat Special pass!

Ship this Crony General around the country, he can clear up the entire country's court systems' backlog - probably, without breaking a sweat!

It can be like an inspection, kind-of-thing.

With, or without his jackboots, they line up all the wrongdoers, the arrested and indicted, and Crony General Mukasey walks up and down, perhaps giving him a riding crop, for the effect, tapping them on the shoulder ... Guilty .. Guilty ... Innocent ... Innocent, as he goes up and down the lines.

It is, apparently, as easy as that.

Though, this may backfire on them ... I mean, a few guilty ones may slip by him, especially if they are crafty enough to tell the Crony General that "the President said I could do it".

There it is, the Pass Go and Collect $200 magic bullet.

That seems to be about the extent of any investigation that Crony General Mukasey needs.

No gumshoe, pounding-the-pavement for this Crony General.

No hours, upon hours, under a single, hot, glaring light bulb, of interrogation (after all, any type of interrogation, harsh or otherwise, isn't, exactly Mukasy's strong suit).

Just let justice rip ... Shoot it straight from the gut!

Wait a minute ... Again, we underestimate the Bush Grindhouse.

Perhaps the Director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, passed along, to Crony General Mukasey, the secrets of "feeling in your gut", after he became the "Human Terror Alert".

Move over McGruff, we have now Crony General Michael Mukasey, not a crime-fighter, rather, a crime-decider!


Bonus Crony General Mukasey Riffs

Eli/Firedoglake: Rule Of Law Still Clinging To Life

CNN: Attorney general declines to investigate Bush advisers

Was The Mukasy Vote Part Of That Rovian New Math?

The Crony General Slinks Away ... "I have seen tyranny, dishonesty, corruption, and depravity of types I never thought possible"

Top Ten Cloves: Other Conditions President Bush Has To Allow Rove and Miers To Testify Before Congress



















To the kennels for you, Canine Cop Boy ... There's a new Crime-Decider in town, and he isn't interested in taking a bite out of it

Mukasey Plays The Card ... So, Pelosi, We Need That Table - Now!

Well, the new Crony General might as well had a brass band playing behind him.

Crony General Michael Mukasey, and this was real big of him, let the House Judiciary Committee know today that - Surprise, Surprise - he has no intentions of opening criminal investigations on the Bush Grindhouse, for their admitted torture of detainees or their illegal wiretapping.

The reason?

The Department of Injustice signed off on the practices as LEGAL!

That being the previous Crony General, and the handpicked henchman, the Bush Grindhouse stocked it with.

Duh!

Didn't Woody Allen do a film like this? ... The Marx Brothers?

From David Kurtz, over on TalkingPointsMemo;

"It is as brazen a defense of the unitary executive as anything put forward by the Administration in the last seven years, and it comes from an attorney general who was supposed to be not just a more professional, but a more moderate, version of Alberto Gonzales (Thanks to Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer for caving on the Mukasey nomination.).

President Bush has now laid down his most aggressive challenge to the very constitutional authority of Congress. It is a naked assertion of executive power. The founders would have called it tyrannical. His cards are now all on the table. This is no bluff."

Steve Benen, from The Carpetbagger Report, notes in his Mukasey to honor the ‘get out of jail free’ card the administration gave itself "I’m fairly certain impeachment was developed for situations like these."

Hear that Harry Reid?

Hear that Nancy Pelosi?

Think you can, Nancy, dig up that table you so callously tossed aside, to put an end to this madness?

If not, it's still out there for anyone that wants to save this country, The Garlic laid it out last July, and it's still a good deal;

Happy 4th of July ... Okay, It May Be Down To This .... Citizen's Arrest!

Help Me Mr. Wizard!


More Mukasey Treason

dday from Hullabaloo: If The President Does It, Then It's Not Illegal

emptywheel: Mukasey Refuses to Say Whether He Was Instructed Not to Enforce Subpoenas

Justice Dept. 'Cannot' Probe Waterboarding, Mukasey Says













Hmmm ... Did Mukasey get the thick, bulging envelope up-front, or does he get it on the way out, after the job is complete?

Minced Garlic: New Keith Olbermann Special Comment ... Bush put telecoms ahead of citizens

Sorry we're late with our usual highlighting of, yet another stellar, Keith Olbermann Special Comment, fumed and ranted Thursday evening (For one, The Garlic has been working at half-speed the past few days, a bit under-the-weather and, MSNBC was a bit slow in posting the transcript).

Olbermann tackled the FISA fiasco, and was particularly steamed throughout the special comment.

The Garlic already had its' rant on this last Monday, offering the Democrats in Congress two reasons not to cave in on this issue.

For The Commander Guy, his henchmen (and the entire Republican Freakshow echo machine) has done purple-in-the-face, demanding Congress give The Commander Guy HIS FISA Bill, his Orwellian 'Protect America Act', for if they don't, terrorists are going to immediately invade the country and kill us all.

Being the current law works just fine (assuming, the people working it are honest and law-abiding), and it's been crystal clear this fevered push for The Commander Guy's PAA is about giving immunity to the telecommunications companies that broke the law with them.

With every dam, there comes a crack;

Which is why the Vice President probably shouldn't have phoned in to the Rush Limbaugh Propaganda-Festival yesterday.

Sixth sentence out of Mr. Cheney's mouth.

The FYCA bill is about, quote, "retroactive liability protection for the companies that have worked with us and helped us prevent further attacks against the United States."

Oops.

Mr. Cheney is something of a loose cannon, of course.

But he kind of let the wrong cat out of the bag there.

Because Mr. Bush and the corporations he values more than people didn't want anybody to verify what Mark Klein says.

Mark Klein is the AT&T Whistleblower who appeared on this newscast last November... who explained, in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood IT desk, how he personally attached all of AT&T's circuits, everything carrying every phone call, every e-mail, every bit of web browsing into a secure room — Room Number 641-A, at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, where it was all copied so the government could look at it.

Not some of it; not just the international part of it; certainly not just the stuff some truly patriotic and telepathic spy might be able to divine had been sent or spoken by or to a terrorist.

Everything.

Every time you looked at a naked picture, every time you bid on eBay, every time you phoned-in a donation to a Democrat.

"My thought was 'George Orwell's 1984,'" Mr. Klein told me, reflecting back, "and here I am, being forced to connect the Big Brother machine."

And there was this chewy morsel of a caveat;

There's yet another level to this, and here we move from Big Brother to Sleazy Son.

Mr. Bush's new Attorney General, Mr. Mukasey, the one who has already taken four different positions on water-boarding, and who may yet tie that record on this subject of telecom immunity, he has a very personal stake in this.

There happens to be a partner in the law firm of Bracewell and Giuliani, named Marc Mukasey. And Bracewell and Giuliani and the Attorney General's son Marc, just happen to represent Verizon.

You know, Verizon — Telecom Giant.

And all of a sudden this is no longer just a farce in which "protecting the Telecoms" is dressed up for us as, "protecting us from terrorist conference calls."

Now it begins to look like the bureaucrats of the Third Reich trying to protect the Krupp Family industrial giants by literally re-writing the laws for their benefit.

And we know how that turned out: Alfried Krupp and eleven of his directors were convicted of War Crimes at Nuremburg.

Hmmm ... The new Crony General has a personal stake in this ... Very interesting ...That is, of course, the Crony General admits to having son ...

Why, just the other day, the Crony General displayed his prowess;

From Glenn Greenwalds' "Mukasey's radical worldview is now the norm";

While Mukasey may be marginally more straightforward than Alberto Gonzales was -- more willing to conform to the procedural formalities of independence -- he is, ideologically, a clone of John Yoo and David Addington and is as much of a loyal adherent to the Bush/Cheney extremist worldview as Gonzales ever was.

Mukasey explicitly embraces the most extreme theories of presidential omnipotence and lawlessness and displays as much Cheney-ite contempt for the notion of Congressional oversight as the Vice President himself. He repeatedly endorsed patently illegal behavior -- including torture -- and refused even to pretend that he cared what the Senate thought about any of it. He even told Republican Senators that they have no right to pass a whistleblower law allowing federal employees who learn of lawbreaking to inform Congress about it, because such a law would infringe on the President's constitutional powers. In Mukasey's worldview, the President has unlimited power and Congress has none.

And Dahlia Lithwick, over on Slate, from her "Thank You. Now Go to Hell.Mukasey stonewalls Senate Democrats on water-boarding, and practically everything else.";

Over the course of a long, maddening day, it's quickly manifest that Mukasey's legal opinions have a 30-second shelf life. He won't opine on what's happened in the past and he won't opine on anything that might happen in the future. When Sen. Arlen Specter—concerned about seven years of vast new claims of executive authority—asks Mukasey whether, in his view, the president "can break any law he pleases because he's the president—including, say, statutes banning torture," as well as FISA and the National Security Act, Mukasey replies, "I can't contemplate any situation in which this president would assert Article II authority to do something that the law forbids."

"Well, he did just that when he violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," Specter shoots back. Mukasey's response? "Both of those issues have been brought within statutes."

Specter is flabbergasted: "But he acted in violation of statutes, didn't he?"

"I don't know," Mukasey replies. But does is really matter? What's past is past.

And Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., tries to get Mukasey to explain why the Justice Department is investigating the destruction of the CIA torture tapes, but not investigating the underlying torture itself.

Mukasey's reply, "I don't start investigations out of curiosity," speaks for itself. When Whitehouse tries to get Mukasey to agree that they both know enough classified information to have a very concrete, nonspeculative legal discussion about whether what happened on those tapes is legal, Mukasey again insists that whether or not what happened on those tapes is legal is about which "certifications were given" and "who permissibly relied on it." Whitehouse calls this the "Nuremberg defense. ... I had authorization and therefore I'm immune from prosecution."

Any doubt that Crony General will go after those undertaking the illegal wiretapping?

Me thinks pigs will fly before that ever happens


Read Keith Olbermann's Special Comment "Bush put telecoms ahead of citizens; Pres. Bush demands a law which would clear phone giants from responsibility for government's unjustified spying on Americans"

Watch The Special Comment Video