Rayne Today

(courtesy of commenter 'egregious') Dodd: “We hold the Bush administration accountable during the redeployment period by requiring the Secretary of Defense to regularly report to Congress on the draw-down of forces during that period; we institute measures that would make funding within the redeployment period contingent on the progress of the phrased redeployment; we restore the readiness of our military, we use additional funds that come in, the Reserves, National Guard, by transferring portions of the moneys that would have otherwise been available for combat activities. That’s the outline of the amendment. It hasn’t been drawn up as an amendment yet but those are the major provisions we would include in the bill. Again, we abbreviate the period between the enactment date and the beginning of redeployment, we maintain the same date at the end of March of 2008; we utilize the resources that come in to support Reserves, National Guard, military readiness. We have benchmarks...

Grow a spine. Vote NO on the Supplemental. Support our troops by ending this war now. Sincerely, Rayne

So Washington Post says in an op-ed yesterday : "And so we will put in place programs to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people, and programs that we constantly brief to Congress," Mr. Bush assured the country yesterday, as he brushed off requests for a more detailed account. But this is exactly the point of contention. The administration, it appears from Mr. Comey's testimony, was willing to go forward, against legal advice, with a program that the Justice Department had concluded did not "honor the civil liberties of our people." Nor is it clear that Congress was adequately informed. The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain. That cannot be allowed to happen. (emphasis mine) Yup. Many citizens have been angry about the NSA warrantless wiretapping controversy, in addition to a growing cascade of other equally disturbing and unacceptable controversies. We've...

Over at The Next Hurrah , Emptywheel has been cranking away at the U.S. Attorneys scandal. Between her, "mbw" of Wampum and myself, we've been looking more deeply into the relationship between the U.S. Attorneys dismissed as the Gonzales Eight, Abramoff and Cheney's Energy Task Force. The point of intersection is the U.S. Attorney General's Native American Issues Subcommittee (NAIS), of which many of the dismissed U.S. Attorneys were members. The rational behind dismissal of these particular U.S. Attorneys is multi-fold; Native Americans were targets of suppression masked as "voter fraud" prosecution, were manipulated out of money by Abramoff while seeking better representation from a neglectful federal government, and manipulated into giving up energy-rich lands or rights to them. One of the other critical issues at play behind the manipulation of Native Americans by Cheney Co and Abramoff is the global transition from petroleum-centric hegemony to a...