I’ve been visting this site called Alive in Baghdad. It’s a videoblog based in the US but staffed by videobloggers in Iraq.
Here’s a short segment on Wisam, a recent college graduate who lives in Baghdad but spends most days inside playing video games because it’s too dangerous to venture outside.
TPM Reader JO, on the U.S. Attorney purges:
A lot of people seem to be getting snowed by the dodge that some of the acting US Attorneys will go through the confirmation process as if it gets rid of the problem, but it really doesn’t.
Before they changed the statute, the President had no effective way to put a political stooge in as US Attorney for more than 4 months without buy-in from another branch of government (or a year at most via a recess appointment). But now he can, and putting the stooge up for confirmation is a no-lose proposition. If the Senate confirms, great. If they never give the nominee a hearing, they only prolong his tenure. And if they reject the nominee, he can still stay in office until a new nominee is appointed — which might never happen.
This is a serious blow to effective law-enforcement, and it’s going to make morale plummet in prosecutors’ offices all over the country.
Has anyone introduced legislation yet to strip this misguided provision from the Patriot Act?
Update: The answer is yes. Senators Feinstein, Leahy, and Pryor have introduced the Preserving United States Attorney Independence Act, which would restore to the District Courts the power to appoint interim U.S. Attorneys.
Interesting. Some days I’m so busy I don’t even get a chance to look at stories that show up on other TPM sites. So just perusing TPMmuckraker here, I see that apparently Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) was told that the culling of US Attorneys out west is being done so other GOP toadies can pad their resumes with a high-profile job.
Longtime TPM Reader MM comments …
Scandals as Assessed by the Post
Page A1, 1060 words:
Identity of Edwards Home’s Buyers Veiled
Assisted-Living Magnates in SEC Probe Paid Candidate $5.2 Million
Page A9, “Findings,” 352 words:
Big Tobacco Boosting Nicotine in Cigarettes: Study
You got the sense this week that the federal investigations into Republican corruption were going to muscle their way back into the news on a more regular basis.
Former GOP Congressman Bob Ney was sentenced today to 2 1/2 years in prison for his role in the Jack Abramoff scandal. (The best headline for that story was “Abramoff Republican Sentenced.” Abramoff Republicans. I like that. You had Radical Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, and now Abramoff Republicans. Sums up the era, doesn’t it?)
In other Abramoff news, an indictment of former Bush Interior official Steven Griles appears imminent. Griles has resigned from the lobbying firm of Lundquist, Nethercutt & Griles LLC and from the Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission. He has also beefed up his legal defense team.
Duke Cunningham briber Mitchell Wade, founder of the now defunct defense contractor MZM, is still singing like a canary. His sentencing will reportedly be delayed for another six months so that his cooperation with the feds can continue. That investigation will continue without the involvement of Carol Lam, we learned this week. The San Diego U.S. Attorney whose office was leading the Cunningham investigation and its various outgrowths was pushed out of office by the Bush Administration for reasons which are still unclear and therefore suspicious.
While the criminal justice side of the scandals ground slowly onward, the political house-cleaning swept along in ways large and small. In Washington, the Senate, after the usual jockeying and gamesmanship, passed an ethics reform bill that was tougher than many had expected and than Majority Leader Harry Reid may have wanted. In Texas, the state canceled controversial lobbying contracts with two Tom Delay-connected lobbying firms, vestiges of the headier days of GOP dominance.
For my money, though, the best antiseptic was a return to congressional oversight. The lights and cameras focused on high-profile hearings, like the appearance of the Attorney General before the Judiciary Committee, but the hardest and most important work is done out of the view of the cameras in the myriad of little ways that Congress, when doing its job properly, can hold the Executive to account.
This morning, for example, the Washington Post ran an important story on an effort, later abandoned, by GSA Administrator Lurita Doan to award a no-bid federal contract to a company owned by her former business partner and friend. Before the day was out, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee had opened an investigation, and Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) had fired off letters to Doan and the two other principal players in the Post story requesting documents and information pertaining to the contract in question.
The days of wine and roses for our Republican friends are over.
Jury selection can be as slow as watching paint dry, but MSNBC’s David Shuster teases out some interesting tidbits from week one of the Scooter Libby trial.
Heckuva job, Brownie:
Party politics played a role in decisions over whether to take federal control of Louisiana and other areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, former FEMA director Michael Brown said Friday.
Some in the White House suggested only Louisiana should be federalized because it was run by a Democrat, Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Brown told a group of graduate students at a lecture on politics and emergency management at Metropolitan College of New York.
Brown said he had recommended to President Bush that all 90,000 square miles along the Gulf Coast affected by the hurricane be federalized, making the federal government in charge of all agencies responding to the disaster.
“Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking we had to federalize Louisiana because she’s a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,” he said.
Paging Sen. Lieberman. Sen. Lieberman? Joe, where are you?