J's Cafe Nette

Archive for August 24th, 2007

Much has been written and said about the Michael Vick situation so I will not post on the well known details. I am pleased however, to see that the Commissioner of the NFL has done what I believe to be not only correct but admirable.

The NFL indefinitely suspended Michael Vick without pay Friday just hours after he acknowledged in court papers that he did, indeed, bankroll gambling on dogfighting and helped kill some dogs not worthy of the pit. Vick, however, insisted he placed no bets of his own nor took any winnings.

In disciplining Vick, commissioner Roger Goodell said Vick’s admitted conduct was “not only illegal but also cruel and reprehensible” and regardless whether he personally placed bets, “your actions in funding the betting and your association with illegal gambling both violate the terms of your NFL player contract and expose you to corrupting influences in derogation of one of the most fundamental responsibilities of an NFL player.”

I would say this is one of the stronger statements to come from a Commissioner in any of the major sports in some time. In my opinion, for the activities he was involved in, Vick, deserves this punishment and more.

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Can you believe this? I wonder if she is wearing a diaper to court.

– Former astronaut Lisa Nowak, accused of attacking a romantic rival, asked a judge Friday to let her remove her electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, saying that it causes abrasions and gets in the way of her military boots laces.

She promised to abide by all court orders if the GPS monitoring device is removed, including not having any contact with Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman, the woman she is accused of pepper spraying.

Shipman also testified, telling the judge that she was still afraid of Nowak. Knowing Nowak has to wear the monitoring device gives her comfort, she said.

Nowak, a 44-year-old Navy pilot, has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted kidnapping, battery and burglary with assault.

Her attorney, Donald Lykkebak, said he planned to ask Circuit Court Judge Marc L. Lubet at the hearing Friday to throw out some of the most damning evidence in the case, including an interview Nowak gave to police and items found during a search of her car.

In an interview with detectives, Nowak had said that she Shipman were vying for the affection of the same space shuttle pilot and that she confronted Shipman in an Orlando International Airport parking lot because she wanted to know “where she stands.”

She is accused of attacking Shipman with pepper spray and trying to
jump into her vehicle. Police say Nowak also had a duffel bag with a steel mallet, 4-inch knife and a BB gun.

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Speaks for itself.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is expected to advise President Bush to reduce the U.S. force in Iraq next year by almost half, potentially creating a rift with top White House officials and other military commanders over the course of the war.

Administration and military officials say Marine Gen. Peter Pace is likely to convey concerns by the Joint Chiefs that keeping well in excess of 100,000 troops in Iraq through 2008 will severely strain the military. This assessment could collide with one being prepared by the U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, calling for the U.S. to maintain higher troop levels for 2008 and beyond.

Petraeus is expected to support a White House view that the absence of widespread political progress in Iraq requires several more months of the U.S. troop buildup before force levels are decreased to their pre-buildup numbers sometime next year.

Pace’s recommendations reflect the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who initially expressed private skepticism about the strategy ordered by Bush and directed by Petraeus, before publicly backing it.

According to administration and military officials, the Joint Chiefs believe it is of crucial strategic importance to reduce the size of the U.S. force in Iraq in order to bolster the military’s ability to respond to other threats, a view that is shared by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Pace is expected to offer his advice privately instead of issuing a formal report. Still, the position of Pace and the Joint Chiefs could add weight to that of Bush administration critics, including Democratic presidential candidates, that the U.S. force should be reduced.

Those critics include Republican Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, who on Thursday called on Bush to begin withdrawing troops in September to pressure the Iraqi government to move toward political compromise.

Any discord among the top U.S. generals could be awkward for Bush, who professes to rely heavily on advice from military leaders. But there also is tremendous pressure for military officers to speak with one voice and defer to Petraeus and other field commanders. It remains possible that the Joint Chiefs may opt to weaken their stance before approaching Bush.

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Full story here.

The queen of vampire Goth lit — check.

Hollywood’s favorite she-pimp — right on.

The list of new celebrity endorsements continues to mount for the Democratic presidential run of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who leads the pack in election polls, all the while picking up an ever-more interesting cadre of announced political admirers.

“I’m a big fan of Hillary’s. Any woman who’s smart, how can you not be?” Democrat Heidi Fleiss, 41, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal earlier this week.

“Even if you’re a Republican, if you’re a woman and you’re smart, you have to respect her,” she said.

Powerful stuff from a woman who did hard time for routing glamazon sheet surfers to Left Coast power players, and who owns a yuppie laundromat and plans a Vegas-area brothel with a cunningly feminist twist — female customers, male employees.

The newly born-again Christian Anne Rice announced her support for Mrs. Clinton on her Web site in a long letter posted Aug. 10, touting Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic values as being closest to hers.

But the Fleiss pronouncement was unexpected if not possibly unwelcome. And came while skinnier-by-the-moment porn star Jenna Jameson, who announced her retirement from adult films, recently set the public record straight that she is also solidly in the Clinton camp.

=)) )

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Dear Guss,

I’ve been thinking about this for some time now and I need to ask you a question.

Do I need to start my own blog so I can write? Please let me know.

Sincerely,
Your favorite cousin/sister ~J~ =))

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I hope that this doesn’t offend anyone.

To many, he was “Bush’s Brain,” the master tactician who would stop at nothing to advance the political agenda of George W. Bush.

But to a growing number of experts within the Beltway and beyond, a more sinister portrait is emerging of former White House political adviser Karl Rove: a man who achieved his record-shattering results only by using steroids.

“The question isn’t whether or not Karl Rove was juicing,” says Davis Logsdon, a University of Minnesota professor who studies steroid use among White House political advisers. “The question is, exactly how much was he juicing?”

In building his case that Mr. Rove used performance-enhancing drugs during his years in the Bush White House, Mr. Logsdon compares his record in Texas, where he was an above-average political adviser, to his tenure in Washington, where he became a pumped-up superstar.

“In Texas, Rove only succeeded in getting a governor elected, but in Washington, he organized the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, staged the ‘Mission Accomplished’ photo-op and outed a CIA agent,” Mr. Logsdon says. “There’s only one way to explain the surge in performance: steroids.”

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Here’s one for ya.

The government has issued a rare written apology in a case involving an Iraqi refugee who was improperly imprisoned and pushed toward deportation by federal agents in Montana, the American Civil Liberties Union branch in Seattle announced yesterday.

The A.C.L.U. said the case should make clear to the Customs and Border Protection agency that racial profiling was both illegal and ineffective.

“The whole reason that he was stopped to begin with was that he appeared Middle Eastern to the agents at the train station,” said Doug Honig, the spokesman for the A.C.L.U. in Washington State. “This sends a strong message that basing law enforcement solely on ethnic profiling is not proper.”

Jeffrey C. Sullivan, the United States attorney for the Western District of Washington, who signed the apology, said the case was about getting the law concerning refugees wrong and nothing else.

In another rare move, Mr. Sullivan’s office joined the A.C.L.U. in seeking to remove the initial court ruling in the case.

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Speaks for itself.

the United Nations Security Council slapped economic sanctions on Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group for its role in weapons proliferation as Iran’s maker of liquid-fueled ballistic missiles.

Known as SHIG, the Iranian firm produces the Shahab III rocket, which has a range of at least 800 miles, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. That radius puts downtown Tel Aviv, Saudi Arabia’s oil fields and India’s financial center, Mumbai, within reach.

Three days after the Security Council ordered a freeze on SHIG’s assets to help block Iran from developing nuclear weapons, the maker of the country’s longest-range missile was ready to go shopping in Europe.

It turned for help to state-owned Bank Sepah, Iran’s fifth- biggest lender. On Dec. 26, a Bank Sepah branch in Tehran issued a 28,845 euro ($39,255) letter of credit on behalf of Sabalan Co. — a front company for SHIG that shares the address and phone number of the missile maker, according to a person with access to details of the transaction. The letter of credit was forwarded to Bank Sepah’s branch in Rome, where Sabalan paid its supplier — Behringer GmbH, the Kirchardt, Germany-based maker of drills and metal-cutting tools.

Christian Behringer, the German company’s co-managing director, says the purchase consisted of parts for industrial sawing machines. He says his company had no idea that a missile producer, which UN sanctions bar from buying any type of equipment, was behind the deal. Nor did he know that Bank Sepah may have helped SHIG skirt the UN prohibition.

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I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about this so I’m going to let the story speak for itself.

Mariya Aman is looking forward to her sixth birthday party next week. Her face lights up when her father, Hamdi, promises her a clown and lots of balloons at the party, and she whizzes up and down the hospital corridor in her electric wheelchair. As he smiles and waves to her, Hamdi Aman’s sad eyes never leave his only daughter. Apart from the birthday party, he says quietly, he has no idea what the future holds for Mariya.
Confined to a wheelchair and paralyzed from the neck down, the Palestinian girl is at the center of a legal fight over whether Israel should continue to take care of her treatment. Back in May 2006, an Israeli missile attack on an Islamic Jihad activist’s car in war-torn Gaza left the Aman family, traveling close behind, in ruins. Mariya’s mother, brother, grandmother and uncle were killed, and Mariya, thrown out of the car into a ditch, sustained serious injuries. Today Mariya is kept alive by an artificial respirator at the Alyn Children’s Rehabilitation Hospital in Jerusalem.

Although it has never formally accepted responsibility, the Israeli government has largely sponsored her complicated medical rehabilitation for the past 15 months. But now her father has been told by the Israeli Ministry of Defense that his daughter must leave Israel and return to the territory of the Palestinian Authority. “Sending her away from this hospital, out of Israel, is like sending her to hell,” says Aman, 30.

A court decision in favor of Mariya Aman could set a precedent and trigger other court appeals from Palestinians injured by similar acts of the Israeli military. Sarit Michaeli of the human-rights organization B’Tselem says there are hundreds of other families who may seek compensation from Israel in the future, something that clearly Israel is not interested in confronting.

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I’ll take one.

Susan Burke’s left knee was humbling her. At 54, she wanted to hike and whitewater raft through the national parks or, at the very least, to stroll around the block with her husband at night, as she’d always done. Instead, she could barely walk from her desk to her office parking lot without popping an Aleve. Her knee wouldn’t leave her alone. Four years earlier, it had started swelling while she was training for an eight-mile trek through Glacier National Park. “I finally decided, ‘All right, I’ll get it checked’,” she says. “The cartilage had worn down to the point of bone on bone.” Burke’s doctor told her she needed a knee replacement, but that wasn’t what she wanted. It was too drastic, and she thought she was too young.
Over the next four years, Burke tried to salvage her knee with arthroscopic surgery, pain meds and lowered expectations for hikes that were “shorter than my usual horizons.” But her knee was still crumbling. Finally, she met a fellow adventurer on a plane who had just had both knees replaced. He had a temporary cane, but he was young, in his 50s, and he seemed happy. Suddenly the idea of becoming bionic didn’t sound so bad. “I thought, ‘Geez Louise, maybe I should do something like that’,” she says. In July, she did; her new right knee is made of plastic and metal. If you happen to be sitting next to her on a plane, she’ll tell you that she has only one complaint: it’s annoying to go through the airport metal detector.

Knee and hip replacements are serious surgeries, but increasingly, they’re also a serious business. As the baby boomers’ joints wear out, more of them are turning to orthopedic surgeons for the procedures. Docs now perform more than 450,000 knee replacements and 208,000 hip replacements a year, and rising numbers of them are done to boomers willing and able to pay $30,000 and up. By 2031, one study predicts, docs will perform more than 3.5 million knee replacements alone—a 673 percent increase from current numbers. It’s as if an entire generation has taken Matthew 18:8 to heart: “If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee.” And, apparently, sub in something better and keep going.

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This is so outrageous that I can’t find the words to describe my anger.

father said he asked his son to give up dogfighting, or to at least put property used in the venture in the names of others to avoid being implicated, according to a report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Also Thursday night, a report on ESPN.com cited an unidentified ESPN source saying Vick will not admit to killing dogs or gambling on dogfights when he enters a guilty plea in a Richmond, Va., federal court Monday.

The source told ESPN that Vick’s defense team met with federal attorneys Thursday afternoon to determine the “summary of facts” to which Vick will plead. But the source says Vick maintains he never killed dogs and never gambled on a dog fight. The source said the Atlanta Falcons quarterback will plead guilty to the charge of interstate commerce for the purpose of dogfighting.

On Monday, Vick agreed to plead guilty Monday in the federal dogfighting case in Richmond. He faces up to five years in prison and the possible end of his football career. Three co-defendants already pleaded guilty and were expected to testify against Vick if the case went to trial. In addition, a Virginia prosecutor is considering bringing state charges against Vick.

In The Journal-Constitution report posted on the newspaper’s Web site Thursday night, Michael Boddie, who is estranged from Vick and the quarterback’s mother, also said some time around 2001 his son staged dogfights in the garage of the family home in Newport News, Va.

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I don’t understand it. Republicans had better be careful what they wish for.

Washington–From the K Street lobbyist corridor to the major gay and lesbian organizations to the city’s kingpin consultants and fundraisers to the big feminist groups, Hillary Clinton has acquired a near-lock on the Democratic establishment in the nation’s capital.

The level of support here for the junior New York Senator approaches what an incumbent president seeking re-election might expect.

The people and organizations run the gamut: Togo West, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs and CEO of The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the nation’s premier black think tank; Elizabeth Bagley, former US Ambassador to Portugal whose Georgetown home has been the gathering place for countless fundraisers; Elizabeth Birch, former head of the Human Rights Campaign, and her partner, former top recording industry lobbyist Hilary Rosen and, of course, former DNC chair and money-man extraordinaire Terry McAuliffe.

Those names only touch the surface of Clinton’s support among the Democratic establishment.

Take Matthew Bernstein, a prominent Hillary-backer. He is a classic Washington success story. Once a lowly legislative assistant to former Senator Howard Metzenbaum, he is now a lobbyist whose clients paid his law firm $1.98 million during just the first half of 2006, according to reports filed with the Senate. Among those clients is the Estate Tax Coalition seeking permanent elimination of the burdensome levy placed on the nation’s wealthiest citizens.

And then there is Vernon Jordan, one of this city’s highest-profile wheeler-dealers, who is now a Clinton $100,000-plus bundler. And Vernon is not the only major bundler in the Jordan family. His wife, Ann Dibble Jordan is also a $100,000-plus bundler whose credentials as a player in Washington include past or present board memberships at Johnson & Johnson, Automatic Data Processing, Citigroup, and Catalyst; service as a trustee at The Brookings Institution, the University of Chicago, WETA (Washington’s PBS affiliate), and the Phillips Collection; and chair of the Board of Directors at the National Symphony Orchestra.

Barack Obama has ten Washingtonians each committed to raising at least $50,000. Some are well known figures, including former Federal Communications Commission chairman William E. Kennard who is now with the Carlyle Group; and Gregory Craig, who defended President Clinton at his impeachment trial before the Senate. But adding up all the Washington fundraiser-bundlers listed on Public Citizen’s White House For Sale web site, Clinton has 21, more than all seven of her Democratic opponents combined, who have 15.

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Here we go, another investigation.

Department of Homeland Security administrators — fearing additional scrutiny — concealed from federal investigators information-sharing breakdowns that left the U.S. vulnerable to terrorists, internal DHS memos and e-mails show.

The documents obtained by The Washington Times lay out how officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) deliberated telling the Inspector General’s Office that DHS agencies failed to share data before opting to withhold their concerns.

“We better be ready to provide evidence and name names because this type of statement is the height of the post-9/11 criticisms,” former Citizenship and Immigration Services Chief Council Dea Carpenter noted in an e-mail to officials within her DHS agency last year.

The e-mail preceded the removal of references to information-sharing failures in the mammoth department from the third and final draft of a memorandum Mrs. Carpenter wrote for Inspector General Richard L. Skinner. Mr. Skinner had begun a probe into USCIS information-sharing shortcomings at the request of Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, who had received numerous complaints of internal problems in the agency.

In the first draft of the March 2006 memorandum, Mrs. Carpenter said: “We also experience agencies that are unwilling or unable to share all or part of the information they have, notwithstanding ongoing suspicions. Some agencies close out investigations pertaining to suspicious activity but refuse to share the information they have. It is imperative that USCIS receive any and all information so that it can determine whether an individual is eligible for the immigration benefit being sought.”

It noted “the vulnerabilities caused by law enforcement and intelligence agencies who do not post lookouts of potential threats, or proactively share such information in another manner, so as to ensure we do not grant immigration benefits to persons who pose a threat to national security and/or public safety.”

The Inspector General”s Office never saw the information contained in Mrs. Carpenter’s original. The Washington Times obtained all three copies, which include numerous edits annotated in blue.

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Some good news I hope.

Growing Sunni opposition to al Qaeda and in some cases the perception that U.S. troops will leave the country are key factors behind recent and growing stability in Iraq, according to a major U.S. intelligence report based on findings from 16 agencies.

The updated National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a consensus view of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other services, says “measurable” security improvements were made in war-torn Iraq since January and will expand modestly in the next 12 months with continued military pressure on insurgents.

Within hours of the report”s release, Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia called on President Bush to bring some U.S. troops home by Christmas, and Army Secretary Pete Geren ruled out extending troop deployments beyond the current 15 months.

Mr. Warner, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said a small-scale withdrawal — perhaps 5,000 of the 160,000 troops in Iraq — would prod the Iraqi government toward the political reconciliation needed to stem sectarian violence.

The report”s unclassified key judgments warned that “levels of insurgent and sectarian violence will remain high, and the Iraqi government will continue to struggle to achieve national-level political reconciliation.”

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I wish that they would get some new campaign slogans instead of the constant regurgitation of the same old topics. They all do it.

“Islamic terrorists are at war with us,” Rudy Giuliani told about 300 people at a synagogue in Rockville, Md., one evening in July. He likes to say it that way — that they are at war with us, not the other way around. “They want to kill us,” he warned a group in New Hampshire the same month. “They hate you,” he told a woman in Atlanta.

Giuliani says he understands terrorism “better than anyone else running for President,” and he certainly talks about it more than anyone else. “Basically, what he’s selling is, ‘As dangerous a world as this is, I can make it safer,’” says G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz. So far, it seems to be working. Giuliani has been the consistent front-runner of the Republican candidates in most national polls through August.

By framing his campaign this way, Giuliani has raised an interesting question. What does it actually mean to understand terrorism? His supporters might find the question absurd. He owns terrorism, they say. The entire world watched on television as Giuliani led New York City through the aftermath of a terrorism attack. To his opponents, the answer is equally plain: he has no foreign policy experience, and he talks about terrorism as if it’s an enemy country on a continent only he knows how to find.

But being a victim of terrorism, or the steely leader of a recovery, is not necessarily the same as understanding terrorism. Nor is foreign policy experience all that matters. So how would Giuliani actually prevent, contain and respond to the next major terrorist attack in the U.S.? What is his vision for what he considers the existential challenge of our time?

This much is indisputable: Giuliani knows what it means to be a victim of terrorism, to lose old friends in an avalanche of violence and spit the dust of a skyscraper out of his mouth in a new, blackened world. He understands the urgency of speaking to the American people after an attack — and not circling above the ruins in Air Force One. He knows how to grieve and go to work at the same time.

But before 9/11, Giuliani spent eight years presiding over a city that was a known terrorist target. A TIME investigation into what he did — and didn’t do — to prepare for a major catastrophe is revealing. In addition to extraordinary grace under fire, Giuliani developed an intimate knowledge of emergency management and an affinity for quantifiable results. On 9/11, he earned the trust of most Americans; one year later, 78% of those surveyed by the Marist Institute had a favorable impression of Giuliani. This magazine also named Giuliani its Person of the Year in 2001. Assuming he can keep it, trust is a priceless resource in psychological warfare.

The evidence also shows great, gaping weaknesses. Giuliani’s penchant for secrecy, his tendency to value loyalty over merit and his hyperbolic rhetoric are exactly the kinds of instincts that counterterrorism experts say the U.S. can least afford right now.

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It’s about time.

Venezuela’s regional neighbors should be ready to respond to a potential threat from President Hugo Chavez’s arms build-up, which could be used to intimidate rather than for self-defense, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday.

Chavez, a self-styled socialist staunchly opposed to Washington, has irked the White House by spending billions of dollars on Russian fighter jets, attack helicopters and Kalashnikov rifles to refurbish the military.

The Bush administration has banned U.S. arms sales to Venezuela, criticized Chavez’s purchase of jets from Moscow and said his plans to build rifle factories raise concerns about weapons reaching guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.

“It seems as if a build up of this character doesn’t really respond to the reality on the ground there,” U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs Stephen Johnson told reporters during a visit Bogota.

“It has an effect of intimidating neighbors … and democracies in the region need to be able to respond to this in a way that will help reduce this kind of threat,” he said.

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I think that they have declared war on the people of this country along time ago.

China has launched a four-month “war” on tainted food, drugs and exports, state media reported on Friday, as beleaguered officials embraced time-tested campaign tactics to clean up the country’s battered image.

Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi told officials that the campaign, to run to the end of the year, would focus on problem products that have corroded domestic and foreign consumers’ confidence in the “made in China” label.

“This is a special battle to protect the health and personal interests of the public and to protect the reputation of Chinese goods and the national image,” Wu said, according to the government Web site (www.gov.cn).

She called the campaign a “stern political task” — a reminder that officials’ careers may be on the line.

The world’s largest toymaker, Mattel, recalled more than 18 million Chinese-made toys in mid-August because of hazards from small magnets that can cause injury if swallowed, just two weeks after it recalled 1.5 million toys due to fears over lead paint.

Wal-Mart said it was asking suppliers to resubmit testing documentation for the toys it sells after Mattel’s move.

Other Chinese export scares have hit toothpaste, animal food ingredients, tires, eels and seafood, and deadly chemicals that found their way into cough medicine, killing patients in Panama

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I was not in Haditha when these killings occurred and neither were most in the press who wrote stories about atrocities committed. Nor was a Congressman from my home state present in this town but he chose to label these Marines cold blooded killers before a full investigation had even begun.

An investigating officer recommended Thursday dismissing all charges against a Marine accused of murdering two girls in an assault that killed 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha.

Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum, 26, is charged with unpremeditated murder of two girls and negligent homicide on suspicion that he unlawfully killed two men, a woman and a boy. He is also accused of assaulting another boy and a girl.

Investigating officer Lt. Col. Paul Ware said the evidence was too weak for a court-martial. Tatum shot and killed civilians, but “he did so because of his training and the circumstances he was placed in, not to exact revenge and commit murder,” Ware wrote.

Many times over, I have said that if a member of the military deliberately takes the life of another, even in war, they deserve just punishment. Why is it though, that we are willing to grant civilians the right to be innocent until proven guilty but there are those who assume that the opposite should be true when it applies to our military.

Even if this Marine is eventually found not guilty of all charges as has been recommended, he will live the events of that day for the rest of his life just as someone would if they were in a civilian walk of life. War and tragedy are sometime synonymous, Haditha was one of those times.

HT: The Jawa Report

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This is disgusting. These people are rewarded even when they break the law.

When he was last running for the United States Senate from New Jersey in 2002, Robert G. Torricelli collected donations from thousands of people who apparently wanted to see him re-elected. They might be surprised to see how he spent a portion of their money.

Mr. Torricelli, a Democrat who was one of the Senate’s most flamboyant personalities and prodigious fund-raisers, abruptly quit the 2002 race amid allegations of ethical misconduct and became a lobbyist. Since then, he has given $4,000 from his campaign fund to Puerto Rico’s nonvoting member of Congress, $10,000 to Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois and more than $40,000 to Nevada Democratic Party organizations and candidates linked to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid.

All of those politicians had one thing in common: influence over Mr. Torricelli’s, or his clients’, business interests.

In early 2006, for instance, Mr. Torricelli contributed $10,000 from his Senate account to the mayor of Trenton and his slate of City Council candidates, just as city agencies were reviewing an ultimately successful proposal by the former senator to develop retail and office space in the city.

There is no evidence that Mr. Torricelli, who declined to be interviewed for this article, violated federal rules, which allow retired officials to give leftover campaign funds to charities, candidates and political parties. Sean Jackson, Mr. Torricelli’s campaign treasurer and a partner in his lobbying firm, said in an interview that any suggestion that the contributions were tied to his business interests was “ridiculous.” He said that Mr. Torricelli contributed to people he knew or with whom he shared policy goals.

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This guy was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

A CIA inquiry has accused the agency’s ex-chief George Tenet and his aides of failing to prepare for al-Qaeda threats before the 9/11 attacks on the US.
“The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” the CIA inspector general wrote in a scathing report.

The document was completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now. Its release was ordered by Congress.

Mr Tenet, former CIA director, said the inspector general was “flat wrong”.

But some former CIA employees have told the BBC that the criticisms are justified.

Mr Tenet, who enjoyed strong support from President George W Bush, resigned in 2004 citing “personal reasons”.

The review team led by Inspector General John Helgerson found no “single point of failure” that would have stopped the attacks on 11 September 2001.

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I didn’t know that there was a Civil Rights Division in this justice department.

The head of the Justice Department’s embattled Civil Rights Division is to resign at the end of August, officials said yesterday, making him the latest in a series of senior political appointees to leave the agency amid continued controversy over Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Wan J. Kim, the assistant attorney general for civil rights since November 2005, has been closely questioned by congressional Democrats about the administration’s policy decisions and allegations by former career officials of improper hiring within the division, mostly under his predecessor.

Kim is set to join nearly a dozen other senior Justice Department officials and aides who have resigned this year. The departures come as Gonzales fends off calls from lawmakers for his resignation over his handling of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year and congressional testimony that lawmakers have called misleading.

Wan’s predecessor, Bradley J. Schlozman, resigned from the department last week. The department’s inspector general is investigating allegations that Schlozman considered political affiliations in the hiring of career employees.

Gonzales said in a statement that Kim, who joined the department more than a decade ago, has “served the Department of Justice and the American people with distinction and honor.” The statement continued: “I will miss his honest opinions and valuable contributions as an advisor to me.” He praised Kim for enforcing traditional anti-discrimination laws, as well as newer statutes on human trafficking and minority-language ballot requirements.

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Speaks for itself.

It all started, Michael Vick’s estranged father said, when the Atlanta Falcons quarterback was a child growing up in a rough area of Newport News, Va., and would join other neighborhood kids in setting loose a dog every so often to watch it chase a cat around a nearby lumberyard.

Vick’s “fascination with animals” eventually would lead him to be an active participant in a dogfighting operation, Michael Boddie said in an interview yesterday in which he traced his son’s involvement in the illegal activity to Vick’s college days at Virginia Tech. Boddie said he was dismissed by his son when he tried to convince Vick that being involved in dogfighting was potentially harmful to his career.

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In part one of a four part series, Michael Yon tell us of the “Ghosts of Anbar.”

Our Anbar-war can be said to have begun after the invasion in 2003, and for most of its duration, Fallujah has been the crucible Anbar city. In the beginning, in this city of mosques, the people of Fallujah had not resisted. But friction bred of perceived injustices seethed steadily, until the light fighting of 2003 exploded early in 2004, when on the final day of March in that year, four contractors were murdered and mutilated in Fallujah. The spokesmen for the killers called it an act of revenge, justice even. They called the murdered contractors mercenaries; their charred corpses dangling from what soldiers and Marines now call “Blackwater Bridge.”

This segment is presented with some fascinating pictures of gravestones from years gone by.

As always, Michael dispatches a concise, unbiased report.

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Now here is a man that shouldn’t be walking the streets free and CNN will now be taken off my channel list of news networks.

This afternoon on The Situation Room, CNN ran one of their “Keeping Them Honest” segments about Crandall Canyon mine owner Robert Murray , examining the safety record of Murray Energy’s 19 other mining operations. Murray correctly claimed that the safety record of Crandall Canyon was “almost outstanding, much better than the national average” — though tragically, that was obviously prior to the collapse that trapped 6 miners 18 days ago and launched a risky recovery mission that took the lives of three rescuers one week ago tonight. CNN looked into Murray’s other mining operations, though, and found some shocking statistics: Of Murray’s 19 mines, 7 were underground and 4 of them had accident rates above the national average. CNN specifically cited Murray’s Illinois Galatia mine, which CNN reports has racked up 3,485 safety citations in the last 2.5 years, and has had an above-average rate of injury every year since Murray bought it. Murray’s Galatia mine has racked up 968 safety citations in 2007, almost a quarter of which are considered “significant and substantial.” Murray challenges many of the citations — but has also paid approximately $700,000 in fines from 2005-2006. Great information to have — but wow, is it ever late.

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I’m probably one of very few that doesn’t care what happens to Iraq once we leave so I’ll let this article speak for itself.

A stark assessment released Thursday by the nation’s intelligence agencies depicts a paralyzed Iraqi government unable to take advantage of the security gains achieved by the thousands of extra American troops dispatched to the country this year.
The assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, casts strong doubts on the viability of the Bush administration strategy in Iraq. It gives a dim prognosis on the likelihood that Iraqi politicians can heal deep sectarian rifts before next spring, when American military commanders have said that a crunch on available troops will require reducing the United States’ presence in Iraq.

But the report also implicitly criticizes proposals offered by Democrats, including several presidential candidates, who have called for a withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by next year and for a major shift in the American approach, from manpower-intensive counterinsurgency operations to lower-profile efforts aimed at supporting Iraqi troops and carrying out quick-strike counterterrorism raids.

Such a shift, the report says, would “erode security gains achieved thus far” and could return Iraq to a downward spiral of sectarian violence.

After a summer of rancorous debate over the future of America’s mission in Iraq, the intelligence report is the most prominent and authoritative assessment to date of what the administration calls a surge strategy.

The report, which represents the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies, suggests that policy makers face a dilemma. While the current strategy in Iraq has produced “measurable but uneven improvements” in security, it says, the approach has done little to bridge sectarian divides in Iraq. The report also says that pulling American troops out of Iraq would most likely make things far worse.

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What the heck is going on in the peoples house?

Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) will not be running for reelection next year, creating a highly contested open seat in a competitive eastern Arizona district.

“I will not be seeking reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2008. I am honored and thankful to serve Arizona’s 1st District and appreciate all that we have accomplished together over the past 6 years,” Renzi said in a statement released by his office.

Renzi had been under an ethical cloud for much of the year, amid a federal investigation into his business dealings. He resigned from all of his committee assignments, and was under pressure from GOP leadership to vacate his seat. He also suffered financial woes: At the end of the second quarter, Renzi’s legal bills were higher than the amount of money in his campaign account.

Renzi’s retirement is the fifth among House Republicans in the last month, following announcements from Reps. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) and Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) that they will not be seeking reelection.

There will likely be a crowded Democratic field vying for the nomination. State Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick has already announced her candidacy, and is considered one of the leading candidates. Attorney Howard Shanker and television reporter Mary Kim Titla have also announced campaigns, with a slew of other Democrats considering bids.

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