GONZO-GATE TO BRING ROVE DOWN?

IMPORTANT: The military is recruiting prisoners now. A prisoner's father called the Ed Schulz show to report that his son was approached with an offer: join the military and get out of prison!

SATURDAY MORNING TUNE IN LIVE FROM LAS VEGAS and LOS ANGELES to our show BASHAM AND CORNELL PROGRESSIVE TALK
from 9 - 10 a.m. We broadcast live -- or go to our website and click on the link to hear the entire show in the archives.

THIS WEEK we interview Media Matters' Eric Boehlert on his report "If it's Sunday it Must be Conservative." Boehlert is the author of LAPDOGS: "How the Press Rolled Over for Bush." A look inside one of the great journalistic collapses of our time, this terrific book details how the corporate-owned news media utterly failed in their duties to the American people. Cowardly and clueless, the U.S. media abandoned its post as Bush led the country into a disastrous war. Question: why does the media appear to have a liberal bias to the conservatives? Hate to ruin yoyur party, but the truth is, THE TRUTH HAS A LIBERAL BIAS! Bad news out of Iraq is simply the truth, not a fiction, no matter how Bush and Fox News tries to propagandize it.


Upcoming: Congressman Charles Rangel will be our guest April 14. He will discuss his 30-year Congressional career and his new book, "And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since: From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress." Recently our guest was Mark Green, one of the new owners of Air America, founder of New Democracy Project and author of "Losing Our Democracy." We've had some amazing guests the past 3 weeks: former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, author of "U.S. vs BUSH" which is going to be a movie, a courtroom drama on the Bush Impeachment. We also had Media Matters' Paul Waldman, author of "Being Right is Not Enough".


Several disturbing items for readers to comment on:

1. In the Gonzo-gate scandal, Monica Goodling says she'll plead the Fifth Amendment. Who pleads the 5th? Only the guilty: criminals, mobsters, murderers, and crooks. You don't please the 5th unless you're guilty," as commenter Worfeus says.

According to the Courier Journal.com Ms. Goodling's decision, which was not authorized by her superiors, invites one of three damaging conclusions:

1. One is that a top Justice Department official cannot testify for fear that she will be implicated in a criminal act.
2. Another is that the Fifth Amendment dodge is a smokescreen -- that the real concern of Ms. Goodling, who was a liaison between the Justice Department and the White House, is that she would have to make embarrassing revelations about the political motives behind the ousters.
3. A third possibility, of course, is that Ms. Goodling resolved not to be this scandal's Scooter Libby, an underling tossed to the wolves to protect higher-ups.

Well, apparently every administration nowadays has a Monica who causes it grief. (MORE BELOW)

MORE ON MONICA-GATE: Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's senior counselor,a graduate of Pat Robertson's University (Regent U) yesterday refused to testify in the Senate about her involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys who serve at the "pleasure of the president" invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The decision means a senior aide to the nation's top law enforcement official is in the remarkable position of refusing to testify for fear of implicating herself in a crime. Her lawyer portrays the move as strategic and says she has done nothing wrong. Apparently she has information so incriminating, she is afraid to testify. Source: Dan Eggen of Washington Post.com

Monica M. Goodling, who has taken an indefinite leave of absence, said in a sworn affidavit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she will "decline to answer any and all questions" about the firings because she faces "a perilous environment in which to testify." Here's more from TPM Muckracker: Monica Goodling does have a good faith basis for pleading the Fifth Amendment - just not the ones in her lawyer's letter that are getting all the attention.

"Under the federal False Statements statute, 18 USC 1001, it is a felony to cause another person to make a false statement to Congress. Since McNulty has allegedly told Senator Schumer that he made a false statement to Congress based on information provided to him by Monica Goodling, Goodling could very well be prosecuted for a Section 1001 violation.

All the rest of the crap in her lawyer's letter is intended to sooth as much as possible White House anger at her for invoking the Fifth. Comment from Think Progress: “She could shed light on the extent of White House involvement in the dismissals." Yeah but she won’t. After all, being a “good little Republican” means putting them before God or country..."

SEMI-SPOOKY ITEMS to discuss:

* This has been bothering me: President Bush doesn't seem to mind that our military is dwindling and "not ready." Could this mean that he is only interested in bombing campaigns, eliminating the need for troops altogether? It seemed he delighted in carpet bombing Baghdad, and gleefully stepped onto the aircraft carrier declaring "Mission accomplished!" I have a feeling Bush doesn't think ground troops are as effective as nuking or bombing entire nations. I pray I am wrong.

* Haliburton is building a huge factory in Mexico that will be "cost effective" (translation: slave labor)

* 150 White House and State Department officials are graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University. Bush replaced seasoned Harvard and Ivy League-educated career veterans with these young, inexperienced "Christian evangelical" graduates. I interviewed a young law student who attended Regent U. She was appalled at how they used the "n" word constantly, and were all very isolated young people who had been home-schooled. None of them saw anything wrong with using the "n" word and they call themselves CHRISTIANS! I will print her exact words in an upcoming article.

* Bigoted emails from Army recruiter outrage gay man: an Army recruiter combed the internet to find subjects, and found one on a job website. She wrote a letter trying to recruit a young man who had posted on this job website. He wrote back saying he was a gay African American. The Army recruiter ripped into him, declaring he was immoral for being gay and should "vanish" to his own country, apparently Africa -- or wherever he came from. See The Jersey Journal PLEASE BE PATIENT I AM RESEARCHING SPECIFICS ON THIS ARTICLE

IT STARTS FROM WITHIN
Since this is a spiritual progressive blog, I have to put forth what I know is true - that hope really does spring eternal and we must keep our eyes on the good. What we focus on GROWS. At the Pentagon peace rally two weeks ago, a Republican protestor against the protestors held up a sign saying "PEACE SUCKS." I know it isn't sexy to stop arguing or fighting. I know it's more fun to gossip, vent, scream, yell and find fault with others. I know it is more exciting to watch a train wreck than a healing, but it doesn't help heal anything, in fact it keeps us stuck. Bad news proliferates because of our constant nurturing of it. I'm not saying stop shining a light on the bad guys like Rove, Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Delay, and corrupt corporations. I'm saying let's also uplift each other by seeing the hope that is right around the corner. We need to see our innate goodness and know that truth will thrive as good people come into power. - Lydia

ABUSE OF POWER * WEASELS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Clif posted this astounding article today Volunteer Soldiers Devastated by Iraq Weren't "Asking for It"



infowars.com

From Arianna Huffington Huffington Post

"We're inside the White House now."

So says Bob Woodward, as portrayed by Robert Redford, in All the President's Men. He was, of course, talking about Watergate, a scandal in which the White House criminally used various arms of government for partisan political purposes.

Sound familiar? It will if you've been following the sordid saga of the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys by the Justice Department.

And, as of this weekend, we're inside the White House now. In an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Alan Weh, chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party revealed that in 2005 he asked a White House staffer who worked for Karl Rove for help in getting rid of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, then followed up directly with Rove in 2006. Weh was unhappy that Iglesias refused to rush an investigation of Democratic officials in time for the '06 election.

According to Weh, his conversation with the Boy Genius went like this:

Weh: "Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?"

Rove: "He's gone."

You can almost picture Rove letting out a satisfied laugh and pressing a button on his desk, a la Dr. Evil, causing a trapdoor thousands of miles away to open under Iglesias' chair.

"He's gone." Unfortunately for Rove, so is Scooter Libby. "Cheney's Cheney" took the fall for "Bush's Brain" once already, but now that he's gone, who will be the one to fall on his sword for the president's beloved thug? Maybe Rove can give Libby a call and convince him to take the hit on this one too, with Bush offering up a pardon two-fer in January 2009.

As could be expected, Weh has already started to backpedal, telling the AP that "Rove has little or nothing to do with this."

It doesn't take one of Fox's hotshot fifth graders to figure out that someone got to Weh after the McClatchy story broke. Before his name surfaced in connection to the scandal, Rove was playing down its importance, saying at a speech in Arkansas: "My view is this is unfortunately a very big attempt by some in the Congress to make a political stink about it." But now that the Turd Blossom has hit the fan, it's the White House that is starting to reek.

Not that we should be surprised by any of this. It's just one more vile example of how Bush treats every part of the executive branch: instead of protecting the environment, the E.P.A. is used to weaken it; the V.A. screws veterans; the State Department campaigns against diplomacy; the F.D.A. undermines food safety. And now the injustice at Justice. The Bushies have a long history of playing fast and loose with the law -- evading it, stretching it, getting around it, weakening it, ignoring it, nullifying it.

But now that this use of the Justice Department for partisan advantage is unraveling, Rove and the White House must know the investigations will continue to gather steam. Just yesterday the New York Times called for the ouster of Alberto Gonzalez, as did Senator Chuck Schumer on Face the Nation.

It's an outrage that U.S. Attorneys were fired because of their unwillingness to go along with the abuse of the judicial system being imposed from the top. But the real scandal lies in those who did go along with the abuse. According to a recent study reported by TPMmuckracker.com, 79 percent of elected officials and candidates under federal investigation between 2001 and 2006 were Democrats, and only 18 percent were Republican.

Hard to believe that's just a coincidence and that the pressuring phone calls we've learned about are the only ones that were made. Now that Democrats have the power of subpoena, we can finally uncover the White House connection to those calls. Indeed, according to Newsweek, the list of which U.S. attorneys whose heads were to go on the chopping block was generated by Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, "with input from the White House."

"Input from the White House." Who do you suppose gave that input? Who in the White House is really, really helpful with giving "input" on people whose integrity stands in the way of amassing and abusing more power?

The biggest scandals always start slowly. This one is just beginning to boil, and you can bet it's not going to be a fun year to be "inside the White House" as congressional investigators, journalists, and bloggers fill in the gaps of what's shaping up to be one of the worst abuses of our judicial system since Woodward met with Deep Throat in that parking garage.

We might even be in for a slightly rewritten sequel to this cinematic exchange:


DEEP THROAT: The little ratfuckers are now running our government.

WOODWARD: Who? Be specific. How high up?

DEEP THROAT: You'll We'll have to find that out, won't you we?


Indeed we will. The only question is: Who will play Rove? Suggestions?

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