J's Cafe Nette

Archive for June 22nd, 2007

Well folks, it looks like the White House is going to be dragged, screaming and hollering, before the Judiciary Committee in both houses.
I wonder how it’s going to turn out.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats warned yesterday they would pursue a contempt of Congress motion if the White House fails respond to subpoenas for testimony and documents related to the firings of U.S. attorneys last year.

The deadline for a response is Thursday, June 28. If the White House does not comply, it opens the possibility of a constitutional showdown between the two branches. In an ironic twist, the Department of Justice (DoJ) would be called on to enforce the contempt motion.
During yesterday’s testimony by Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, panel Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) asked McNulty whether he would enforce such a motion. McNulty responded that he would recuse himself from handling such matters because of an internal DoJ investigation into the U.S. attorneys matter.

One of the contempt motions would likely be directed at Presidential Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, to whom the subpoena for documents was addressed, according to a Democratic aide.

Others who could face contempt motions include ex-White House Counsel Harriet Miers and former White House political director Sara Taylor. Last week, the House Judiciary Committee voted to subpoena testimony from Miers, while the Senate Judiciary panel voted to subpoena testimony from Taylor.

“The House and Senate judiciary committees have issued subpoenas to the White House for documents and testimony,” said Conyers. “We’re still hopeful they may cooperate. But it’s still possible that enforcement action may be taken.”

Story

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Michael Yons latest post. I hope he can continue this daily reporting as he has some very encouraging words again today.

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I received an email from my friend and former partner at HRP, COgirl, who has asked me to help get out the word to our readers to see if you will send some money over to Operation A/C.

If you saw the post yesterday about Michael Yon’s latest report you saw that it is extremely hot in Iraq and our troops are doing anything they can to stay as cool as is possible.

From Hang Right Politics and other blogs is a request to give money to this organization via Pay Pal to buy air conditioners for our men and women in this sweltering heat.

The following quote is from Black Five, a mil blog.

On Friday, June 22nd we will begin taking sign-ups from S4s (unit supply personnel) and entire deployed units who are in need of the air conditioners. We already have many units on the ground asking, and our inbox is stuffed with several hundred emails. I asked the people who run this war to help me and they flat out told me, “NO!”(They’re very good at that.)

The question is will you help us do this again? We got those 9,400 air conditioners to our troops in the past by the Grace of God and supporters who believed in us. We know it will once again happen that way this time around.

So we are asking for your financial support. You can go to www.operationac.com and donate by clicking the PayPal button. Or you can send us a check—we are a 501(c)3 non-profit company and our federal tax ID is 02-0699201.

Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, these are American men and women suffering in the heat of Iraq. See what you can do by going to Operation A/C and clicking on the Pay Pal button to help get as many air conditioners as possible to these great people.

My husband has me on a tight budget now, but he agreed this is a worthy cause and we have made a donation. Click the Pay Pal link on the top right corner of the Operation A/C site. The first thing you will see is your login but scroll above to put in a dollar figure or you will think your password doesn’t work. Then put in your login information.

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The CIA is going to declassify hundreds of pages of skeletons in its closet next week.

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency’s worst illegal abuses — the so-called “family jewels” documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency’s opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of “unwitting” tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

“Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history,” Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

In anticipation of the CIA’s release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called “skeletons” in the CIA’s closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA’s infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was “just the tip of the iceberg,” then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, “blood will flow,” saying, “For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro.” Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.

We’ll get to see how history really was made I guess.

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According to the information I have heard about the attempted resuscitation of the immigration bill, Leader Reid will use what is called a “clay pigeon”.

Yesterday I heard it described this way: First the Senate will try to get cloture on the bill. This in itself is doubtful and if cloture is not reached the bill goes to the grave.

If cloture is passed then each amendment (some 21 I heard) will be voted on separately with just a simple majority passing or rejecting any of them.

At the end of the votes for the 21 amendments the entire bill as amended will be voted on with a simple majority required to pass or reject the bill.

Kay Bailey Hutchison and now Charles Grassley have added their names to the no side of cloture.

It’s not often a politician admits to making a mistake, but that’s exactly what Sen. Charles E. Grassley says he did when he voted for the 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens.

Twenty-one years later he has become one of the most steadfast opponents of amnesty and the strongest critic of the federal government’s ability to handle a new legalization program.

“I was fooled once, and history has taught me a valuable lesson. Amnesties just don’t work,” the Iowa Republican wrote in a letter to his colleagues yesterday, telling them he is fulfilling a “duty to warn you of the mistakes” of passing yet another bill that would put illegal aliens on the path to citizenship — this time for an estimated 12 million to 20 million, far more than the 3 million from 1986.

This time around he has also become one of the new Senate bill’s most dangerous foes, offering an amendment that threatens to splinter the fragile “grand bargain” underlying the bill. His proposal would remove some of the obligations of businesses to check the legal status of their workers, and limit immigration authorities’ ability to obtain information from other government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service.

Mr. Grassley said he thought he had agreed with the secret negotiators to protect IRS data. But when the bill was introduced, his provisions were gone.

Asked whether he was worried his amendment would be a deal-breaker, he said that was a problem for the negotiators.

“The deal break was when I left the rump sessions they were having back there in April or early May,” Mr. Grassley told reporters yesterday. “I thought I had a compromise on the table, and when the final document comes out it puts every taxpayer in this country’s privacy in jeopardy.”

Read the rest to see how this amendment could be the deal breaker.

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