Career appointees at the Department of Agriculture were stunned last week to receive e-mailed instructions that include Bush administration "talking points" -- saying things such as "President Bush has a clear strategy for victory in Iraq" -- in every speech they give for the department.

Welcome to the "credibility gap." If you haven't figured it out yet, these people are certifiable and belong in a white room, not the White House.

The USDA on Iraq: Everything's Coming Up Rosy

The Journal also suggested that other lawmakers might be implicated. I've learned from a well-connected source that those under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence comittees—including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post.

Might that be... Porter Goss?

Red Lights on Capitol Hill? (Harpers.org)

"It would be handed over to government — that's where the money would go. It would be taken out of the economy and given to people here in Washington, D.C., to spend."

Not to belabor the point, nor dismiss the questions of government inefficiency, but it seems to me that spending the money puts it right back into the economy.

Bush Makes Case for Extending Tax Cuts - Yahoo! News

HJ0125 - 2 - LRB094 20306 RLC 58347 r

1 to fully investigate these charges to date; therefore, be it

2 RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE
3 NINETY-FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, THE
4 SENATE CONCURRING HEREIN, that the General Assembly of the
5 State of Illinois has good cause to submit charges to the U. S.
6 House of Representatives under Section 603 that the President
7 of the United States has willfully violated his Oath of Office
8 to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United
9 States; and be it further

10 RESOLVED, That George W. Bush, if found guilty of the
11 charges contained herein, should be removed from office and
12 disqualified to hold any other office in the United States.

Will wonders never cease.

Bush Impeachment - The Illinois State Legislature is Preparing to Drop a Bombshell

A sharp disagreement ensued between the FBI and senior Justice Department officials overseeing the case, according to federal law enforcement officials. The FBI was convinced not only that Shelby leaked the information regarding the intercepts, but also that the senator might have misled the FBI when he was interviewed about his actions, according to sources. They advocated that Shelby be prosecuted.

Here's something I hadn't seen before. It seems the FBI wanted to go get this guy, but he appears to have been bailed out to keep the Republicans from looking even worse, and they may have done the exact same thing on the leaking of the Abu Gharib mess.

Still more in a VERY long list of at best unethical moves from our friends at the GOP. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Senate Ethics Committee Clears Shelby (11/13/2005)

The first fundamental question that needs to be answered by and about the president, the vice president, and their political and national-security aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Condoleezza Rice, to Karl Rove, to Michael Chertoff, to Colin Powell, to George Tenet, to Paul Wolfowitz, to Andrew Card (and a dozen others), is whether lying, disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation of information have been a basic matter of policy—used to overwhelm dissent; to hide troublesome truths and inconvenient data from the press, public, and Congress; and to defend the president and his actions when he and they have gone awry or utterly failed.

The other half of "Woodstein" weighs in and he's not following his former partner.

From what I have seen, the above is the way this group handles things, lie and decceive, and either hope something else blows up to distract from the crisis du jour, or blow something up to create a fresh crisis du jour causing people to stop paying attention to the rank odor emanating from yesterday's crisis du jour. That's my opinion of the goings on at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, others may disagree. What I don't think anyone can disagree with is, by plan or accident, yesterday's problems don't get solved, they get swept out of the public eye by a new problem popping up.

Here's a SHORT list of such problems. Bush drops Kyoto, Cheney's energy group, California and the Enron created energy crisis, Stem cell research blocked, 9/11, USAPATRIOT, the sealing of all presidential records without the approval of the sitting president, Privatising Social Security comes up, unilateral withdraw from ABM treaty (without congressional approval), Camp X-Ray opens at Gitmo, the Gonzalez torture memo, the failed Venezuelan coup, Bin Laden escapes Tora Bora, backing out of the World Court, Domestic spying ok'd by Ashcroft, "Premptive War," Jose Padilla, Harvey Pitt and the SEC, Saddm and WMDs, Bush decides to go to war (August of 2002), North Korean nukes, Kissenger named for September 11 commission, Kissenger bails, Paul O'Neill, and that's just the lowlights of 01-02, the full list is much longer and thicker, but you get the idea.

(Thanks to Craig Aaron's list at http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1539/ for lowlights and doesn't even cover the things that we've found out since the 04 election, like who authorized the 02 New Hampshire disenfrachisement, fun with Dick and Scooter and Joe and Valerie, domestic spying by the NSA, etc.)

Bernstein says Senate Hearings Now.

I am a legal resident of Florida. All information on this form is true. I understand that if it is not true, I can be convicted of a felony of the third degree and fined up to $5,000 and/or imprisoned for up to five years.

Whoops. Now what are the rules for being allowed to vote as a felon in Florida again? Not that I seriously think Coulter was deliberately doing something to defraud the.... well wait a second... She registered in one place in Florida, lives in a nother, but hadn't voted at her previous residence in almost a decade? Ok, maybe she was doing something deliberate and maybe she should get squashed for this.

ANN COULTER - FELON

Mr. Fitzgerald's filing talks not of an effort to level with Americans but of "a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson." It concludes, "It is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish Wilson.' "

Disproving a negative is always a thorny to nigh impossible thing to do, but my guess is Fitzgerald is basing this on documentation that there were efforts to this effect, not the "Have you stoped beating your wife yet?" argument. My other guess is, he's getting ready to drop a few more bombs.

With One Filing, Prosecutor Puts Bush in Spotlight - New York Times

The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin, says the contacts involved routine election business and that it was "preposterous" to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.

Really? Would that be as preposterous as the White House outing a CIA agent or cooking the books on Iraq's WMDs so they could start a war?

Phone-Jamming Records Point to White House - Yahoo! News

Hume, on the April 6 edition of DaySide, said: "And so far as I understand it -- and I asked the vice president about this back in February -- both he and the president have the legal authority under an executive order signed by the president to make public classified information. So that takes the unauthorized out of it."

If this is the case, LET'S SEE THE DOCUMENTS! I'm just waiting for someone to make that request and have it declined. That would put a big fat hole right through this argument, but hey, let's say they do release all of this and say "it was all okay, we said he could." Well now we have the conundrum of the "Security" President compromising national security. Welcome to Catch-22.

Media Matters - Ensor, Hume accepted without question claim that Bush's NIE